As the story often goes, all good things must come to an end. I’ve recently learned that the very useful Sunrise Calendar is being discontinued.
In this particular case, the Sunrise team were bought out by the big, and small company hungry Microsoft. What this means is that Sunrise is being discontinued but the team behind the hard work of Sunrise are continuing their work in the field inside the Microsoft Outlook platform.
While it is always a bit of a disappointment for an app to be discontinued, especially one you have over the years really got the hang of, and learned the ins and outs of. Normally, you would still be able to use the app however the development team won’t update it, fix bugs, add features, or otherwise keep it going.
Why Sunrise Is Now Sunset
In this particular case, the Sunrise team have decided keeping the app out there and dying wasn’t the experience they wanted to leave their users.
The Sunrise team have said on their blog post:
“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.”
Right now the dedicated team at Sunrise are working hand in hand with the Microsoft Outlook team to effectively bring Sunrise Calendar into Outlook.
This means it’s not over yet! Sunrise have asked customers who want to follow their favourite calendar app to follow their development of Sunset Calendar in the future.
Microsoft has stated that the Sunrise team have been merged with the Outlook team so it’ll be very interesting to see the new and improved Microsoft Outlook in the future. The main area the Sunrise team will be working on is the mobile applications of Microsoft Outlook.
The key thing to take away from this news is that Sunrise will be removed from the app store on August 31st and they will be shutting down the app all together!
While Microsoft Outlook for Windows has been around for decades it is only recently Microsoft have tried to penetrate the mobile market with an email and calendar package that come together on your mobile device, a big task no doubt as all smart phones come with both already.
Here we can hope that the Sunrise Calendar team can bring their famous calendar software to the mobile market and really take hold, even if it is under the Microsoft Company logo! Good luck Sunrise!
