Gmail’s compose button on Android gets bigger, but only when you scroll down

Gmail’s compose button is annoyingly small and unintuitive on phones. You may have not noticed it, but it’s the round, floating button in the lower right part of the display with a pen or plus icon, depending on whether you’re on an Android phone or an iPhone. 

However, it’s recently gotten better — if just a little — on Android. 

9to5Google noticed that the compose button is now bigger on Android, and it actually says “compose,” making it a lot more visible. It looks a lot like the compose button on the web version of Gmail, though there it is located in the top left, which adds to the confusion. 

There’s a catch, though: the larger button is only there when you open the app and when you scroll down through your list of emails. Scroll up, and it gets reduced to the tiny, round, pen-toting icon again. Check it out in the video, below. 

Personally, I reckon the reasoning behind this is to prevent the button from obscuring too much of your emails. But when that happens, you can just scroll up or down a little, which doesn’t seem like a huge deal (though one could argue that the compose button shouldn’t be floating over the content at all). 

In any case, the new button is an improvement over the old one, but only on the latest version of Gmail for Android. On iOS devices, Gmail users still have to deal with the tiny, round button with a plus sign in it.