Every time an indie app is bought, there’s always a concern that the new owner may lose interest in supporting it, instead moving developers onto other projects and shutting down the app.
With Sunrise, the popular cross-platform calendar app Microsoft acquired last year, the end is near, but users shouldn’t be too sad.
Today, the Sunrise team announced that the app will stop working on August 31. However, the team has already been working hard on the Outlook app, with new Calendar Apps launching earlier and a refreshing overhaul of the calendar section already available.
“We’re not able to support and update Sunrise anymore,” the announcement post reads. “No new features. No bug fixes. For us, that’s the definition of a lousy app and it’s not a user experience we want to leave you with. For this reason, we’ll be removing Sunrise from the app stores in the next few days.”
The sunset of Sunrise has been on the horizon since October, when Microsoft announced it was rolling Sunrise features into Outlook. Microsoft’s email, task management and calendar app has been steadily improving in recent months as the company focuses on strong cross-platform apps.
However, some people are unhappy that Sunrise is being rolled into the larger (and more complicated) Outlook app. If you already have an email app you like, many features of Outlook won’t be of any use.
@reckless pic.twitter.com/vzIncWNvXJ
— Ian (@LinkMatters) October 28, 2015
There are alternatives to Sunrise. GeekWire’s recent App of the Week, Fantastical, is a good replacement for iOS users, but lacks the cross-platform appeal of Sunrise. For Android users and those who aren’t fully embedded within Apple’s ecosystem, Google’s stock calendar is a pretty good option thanks to deep integration with Google Now.
But Sunrise’s ability to pull in content from dozens of popular apps is still pretty unique. Now, you’ll just have to download Outlook to get that feature.
