You might want to think twice before removing the mail app in iOS 10

I wrote last week about the forthcoming iOS 10 release that finally will allow you to remove some of the stock apps including Mail. I speculated at the time as to what this would mean for third party mail apps and clicking mailto links:

What is most interesting about this is that Mail is included in the list. There are many third-party mail apps on the app store at present but one issue has always been that when you click an email address in, say, a web browser the email opens up in the stock mail app. This change implies that somewhere, somehow you will be able to define which app you want to handle these sorts of requests.

Turns out that’s not the case. If you remove the Mail app and then click a mailto link you get the following message:

Clatv-sXEAAb12K

That’s not very helpful or useful and is pretty disappointing that Apple have chosen to take this approach. I am hoping that they see sense during the beta phase and allow the selection of the default mail app rather than persisting with this half baked solution.

Thanks to Xiaohan Jin (@XJin0120) on Twitter for pointing this out.

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