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July 20th, 2012

Bye Bye Sparrow

Somewhat big news today: Google offered jobs to the people who made Sparrow, an excellent mail client for OS X and iOS. Worse, the apps were promptly killed.

They’re still available and still work, but no new features will be added.

It’s really a shame. There aren’t a lot of mail clients around anymore as a rule; most people seem to be fine with whatever comes with their device or computer. I think that makes more sense, arguably, for a device but I had really come to like Sparrow on my iPhone. It just functioned nicer than Mail.app.

At a larger level, this is still Google competing against Apple. Instead of just taking away an app, though, they’ve skipped the entire platform. If you want competition for Apple’s Mail.app, I’m sure Google would rather have you switch to Android than get a different mail client.

Posted in Consumer Commentary, Technology

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