Nothing Was Delivered

I’ve become addicted to the Sparrow email client for the iPhone and especially the Mac. Looks like they’ve been bought by Google, who plans to bring the developers in house to work on who knows what related to Gmail, letting Sparrow die on the vine. 

We will continue to make available our existing products, and we will provide support and critical updates to our users. However, as we’ll be busy with new projects at Google, we do not plan to release new features for the Sparrow apps.

I’ll be honest, I didn’t see this one coming. Sparrow seemed like they were making a nice living selling their app. They were making something useful and getting paid, and we were getting a top notch email client. Seemed like a win-win. You always worry about the free online services. You know that eventually they have to find a way to cash out. When I pay for an app or a service, I suppose I imagine they’re in it for the long haul. 

Still, Sparrow won’t stop working any time soon, so what’s really lost here is the potential for what they could have done with Sparrow in the future. It’s like seeing writer change careers in the middle of a trilogy. You still have the books that had been produced, but there’s a feeling that the story was never completed.