Sparrow, one of the most popular email clients for Mac and iOS devices, has just been acquired by Google. The company will be joining Google’s Gmail team, presumable in order to integrate Sparrow into Google’s web services.
Sparrow CEO Dom Leca stated the following in a post on Sparrow’s official blog:
We’re excited to announce that Sparrow has been acquired by Google!
We care a lot about how people communicate, and we did our best to provide you with the most intuitive and pleasurable mailing experience.
Now we’re joining the Gmail team to accomplish a bigger vision — one that we think we can better achieve with Google.
We’d 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. While we’ll be working on new things at Google, we will continue to make Sparrow available and provide support for our users.
We had an amazing ride and can’t thank you enough.
Full speed ahead!
Dom Leca
CEO
Sparrow
Interestingly, Sparrow’s Mac and iOS apps will continue to remain available, and will still be supported until further notice. The acquisition could mean a lot of things – it could mean Google is looking to improve their web mail experience, or that Google is planning on releasing improved versions of their Gmail app for mobile devices.
Google’s own Gmail app received a lot of critical backlash when it was released earlier this year, due to its lack of push support, and its lack of native code for its critical functions.
It will be interesting to see how this develops. We’ve reached out to Google for comment, and will let you what we hear back if anything. In the meantime, this might be your last chance to grab the Sparrow apps for iPhone and OS X.
Update: Google has provided us with an official statement:
The Sparrow team has always put their users first by focusing on building a seamlessly simple and intuitive interface for their email client. We look forward to bringing them aboard the Gmail team, where they’ll be working on new projects.
Update 2: In an email to Sparrow users, the company states that they will not be releasing any new features for Sparrow
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.
It’s been an honor and a pleasure to build products for all of our wonderful users who have supported us over the years. We can’t thank you enough. We look forward to working on some new and exciting projects at Google!
