Shortwave vs Hindsight
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Shortwave
This AI-powered email client streamlines your inbox with intelligent assistance for writing, organizing, and scheduling. It offers real-time team collaboration, advanced search, and customizable workflows to boost productivity.
- AI-powered email writing and drafting
- Intelligent inbox organization and clutter removal
- Real-time team collaboration and email sharing
- AI-driven meeting scheduling
- Advanced AI-powered search and analysis
- Customizable workflows and AI snippets
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AI-NATIVE EMAIL FOR BUSINESS "The AI revolution is coming for your email" – Business Insider "This app is like ChatGPT for your email, and it changed my life" – Digital Trends "The Google Inbox successor I’ve been waiting for" – The Verge YOUR AI EMAIL ASSISTANT Supercharge your productivity with advanced AI & real-time team collaboration. Write emails, improve drafts, schedule meetings, analyze threads, translate text, and more using Shortwave’s powerful AI Assistant. ORGANIZE YOUR INBOX WITH AI With 1-tap, Shortwave’s AI Assistant can identify urgent emails, group threads into todos, and sweep away the remaining clutter so you can get to inbox zero with zero effort. SHARE & DISCUSS EMAILS WITH YOUR TEAM Get the right people involved and bring everyone up to speed fast with private team comments and live thread sharing. Assign emails to teammates to delegate next steps. WRITE EMAILS WITH AI Write personalized emails with AI in seconds, or use instant AI replies to get full drafts in just one tap. Shortwave learns your unique writing style and even facts about you from the emails you send. IMPROVE AND PROOFREAD DRAFTS Complete your drafts, adjust length and tone, translate into other languages, and more with a built-in AI editor. SEARCH AND FIND ANSWERS Use AI-powered search to find emails fast, or to analyze your entire team's emails & attachments for the answers you need SCHEDULE MEETINGS WITH AI Spend less time juggling calendars with AI-powered scheduling features. Create events, send AI-generated scheduling emails, accept calendar events with one click, and more. GET ORGANIZED WITH SPLITS AND BUNDLES Focus your time & attention by dividing your inbox into tabs for important emails, specific senders, labels & even custom queries. Use bundles for fast triage of promotions, newsletters, updates, and other automated emails. TURN EMAILS INTO TODOS Transform your overflowing inbox into an organized list of action items. Group, rename, prioritize, and add notes, right in your inbox. SET DELIVERY SCHEDULES Avoid interruptions by deferring when emails arrive in your inbox, so you only receive emails when you want them. VIEW READ STATUSES See when people read your emails to get the context you need to prioritize your time and write effective follow-ups. Close more deals and collaborate better with your team. SCREEN UNWANTED SENDERS Guard your inbox from noise with one-click block and unsubscribe. FINE-TUNE PUSH NOTIFICATIONS Granular push controls let you minimize distractions with personalized alerts for specific senders and types of emails. CUSTOMIZE EVERYTHING Customize AI prompts and automate your team’s work with AI Snippets & AI Automations. Adjust tons of details in settings, and make Shortwave yours with custom colors and beautiful light & dark modes. MANAGE MULTIPLE ACCOUNTS Organize all of your Gmail accounts from one app and seamlessly switch between them in a single swipe. SYNCS WITH GMAIL Migrate seamlessly to Shortwave from your existing Gmail or Google Workspace account with all of your labels, filters, and other settings imported. If you have questions or want to learn more about Shortwave and best practices, you can find resources here: https://www.shortwave.com/docs/
Hindsight
This app helps you build a daily reflection habit with short, insightful notes. Organize your thoughts into custom categories and set reminders to stay consistent. Review past entries to gain perspective and foster intentionality in your life.
- Daily reflection habit building
- Short note-taking
- Customizable categories
- Reminder setting
- Past entry review
- Dark Mode support
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Reflection is the best investment we can make to live a better day. It doesn’t take filling up entire pages in a journal to find insights. Short notes about the moments of life add up to a big picture of where we are and help us see more clearly where we want to go. Hindsight is designed to help forge a new habit of reflection in the day-to-day. Customizable to your priorities but dead-simple so nothing bogs you down. Create categories for anything you want to keep track of and set reminders to help keep yourself consistent. Slowing down for a few seconds to think about the moment and jot down a note can bring a surprising boost of intentionality to our lives, but occasionally read the notes from your past self to get the best perspective. Once you have a Hindsight habit, use that newfound perspective to choose the next habit you want to practice—and you can add a new category for it to keep track of your progress. Customizable color schemes for each category and Dark Mode support make this habit easy on the eyes.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is review sentiment: Hindsight at 100% against Shortwave's 65%. Hindsight also leads on rating (5.0 vs 4.8). Shortwave's advantage is update cadence (every 4 weeks vs every 15 months) and ratings volume (754 vs 5). On price, ads, in-app purchases and monetization model there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Both are free to download. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.
Hindsight holds the better App Store score, 5.0 against 4.8. That said, the two scores are not equally well evidenced: Shortwave has 754 ratings behind it against 5, so its average is the more settled of the two. Written reviews point the same way: 65% of Shortwave's written reviews are positive against 100% of Hindsight's.
Shortwave ships an update every 4 weeks, Hindsight every 15 months. Both last shipped on November 3, 2026.
| Parameter | Shortwave | Hindsight |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 4.8 (754 ratings) | 5.0 (5 ratings) — better |
| Positive reviews | 65.4% of reviews | 100.0% of reviews — better |
| Number of ratings | 754 — better | 5 |
| Update frequency | Every 4 weeks — better | Every 15 months |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Monetization | Free | Free |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad, iPod — better | iPhone, iPod |
| Requires iOS | 15.0 | 14.0 — better |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 26 MB | 1 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Shortwave Communications, Inc. | Rakish Labs Ltd. |
Customer experience
Shortwave
Hindsight
Bugs and requests
Shortwave
Reported bugs
3 issues- Unreliable email bundling and threading
- Inconsistent performance and stability issues
- Bugs with email forwarding and attachment handling
Requested features
5 requests- Add support for more email providers
- Improve iPad and tablet optimization
- Enhance customization options for labels and actions
- Integrate with more productivity apps and services
- Provide better transparency around data usage and privacy
Hindsight
Not enough reviews yet to summarise bugs or requests.
In-app purchases
Shortwave
No in-app purchases
Hindsight
No in-app purchases









