Mountain View, California — In a relentless attempt to embellish its existing services with more goodies, search engine giant Google over the weekend stuffed its mail arsenal with a popular email app for Mac and iOS named Sparrow, considered amongst the best alternative to Apple’s native mail app on iOS in a deal valued at just under $25 million.
Sparrow’s CEO Dom Leca, on Friday disclosed the news in a blog post.
Sparrow, a mail application that started in the Mac App Store and made its way over to the iOS app store, has recently been captivating some attention along with generally positive feedback from users. But the acquisition of Sparrow by Google means development has come to an end, and only “minor maintenance and bug fixes” will be released.
The five-member Sparrow bods will be absorbed into the Gmail team. In addition, Sparrow boasts a huge following, and the team is considered to be one of the best iPhone developers in the business, providing extremely popular 3rd-party mail applications for the Mac and iPhone. Leca said in a public statement that the team believes it can better achieve a bigger vision with Google.
According to Blorge reports, “The Sparrow team has always put their users first by focusing on building an uninterrupted simple and intuitive interface for their email client.” “We look forward to bringing them aboard the Gmail team, where they will be working on new projects.”
The spokesperson declined to reveal how much the deal was valued at and what exactly the word “projects” would entail. But, according to various reports, Google forked out $25 million to acquire Sparrow.
“We care a lot about how people communicate, and we did our best to provide you with the most intuitive and pleasurable mailing experience,” Leca said. “We would like to extend a special thanks to all of our users who have supported us, advised us, given us priceless feedback and allowed us to build a better mail application.”
Among other things, the $US9.99 Mac version featured POP and IMAP support, integration with DropBox and CloudApp for ‘sending’ large attachments as links. Other nifty features included a collapsible interface, quick reply (for situations where a message only needs a brief response), and Facebook Connect support.
On the other hand, the user interface of the $2.99 iOS version made use of swiping for multiple functions including switching between mailboxes, uncovering folders, and labeling messages.
Apart from the announcement on Friday, the Sparrow team dispatched email to users stating that Sparrow products will not be receiving new features, but will remain on Apple’s App Stores for iOS and Mac. It is presumed that some of the work done with the native iPad apps will eventually end up in Gmail — when that will be is still up in the air at this point.
Going forward, Gmail support on iOS has been largely criticized in the past, so expect an overhaul building on a lot of Sparrow’s knowhow. Or perhaps more accurately, a wholesale ransacking of Sparrow’s features. For instance, Sparrow integrates Facebook into its inbox, showing profile pictures of who is emailing you right next to their messages. However, sources claim that the acquisition is less about “building for a specific platform,” and more about bringing consistency to the Gmail ecosystem.
Besides, fans of Sparrow need not worry — it will still be available, though it would not receive any updates.
“We will continue to make available our existing products, and we will provide support and critical updates to our users,” Leca said in the blog post. “However, as we will be busy with new projects at Google, we do not plan to release new features for the Sparrow apps.”