Sparrow Mail flips users the bird

This morn­ing’s email includes an email by the mak­ers of my favorite email client for the Mac and for iPhone: Spar­row Mail. At the top of this email is a sim­u­lacrum of Spar­row’s logo, but drawn with Google’s trade­mark col­ors. The email starts off with this cheer­ful news:

We’re excit­ed to let you know that Spar­row has been acquired by Google! You can view our pub­lic announce­ment here, but I want­ed to reach out direct­ly to make sure you were aware of the news. 

Well, this sounds great, does­n’t it? A favorite appli­ca­tion now sup­port­ed by one of the biggest com­pa­nies of the dig­i­tal age? How could that be any­thing short of awe­some? Sad­ly, the next para­graphs told the story:

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! 

Yeah, that’s exact­ly what it sounds like: a real­ly cheer­ful way of say­ing, «we quit.» This may be great news for the Spar­row team, but this email is far from good news for Spar­row’s users. Overnight the best mail appli­ca­tion avail­able on the Mac and on the iPhone became abandonware.

It’s dif­fi­cult to imag­ine a response to this email which does­n’t car­ry seething resent­ment. It is down­right rude of Dom Leca¹ to take a cel­e­bra­to­ry tone whilst deliv­er­ing the most dis­ap­point­ing Spar­row-relat­ed mes­sage possible.

There is not even any pre­tense that Google bought Spar­row for the prod­uct. Spar­row Mail will see no future upgrades, no future bug fix­es, no future enhance­ments, no future fea­tures. The much-antic­i­pat­ed Spar­row for iPad will not ever come to be. Nev­er mind the cal­lous dis­re­spect for the peo­ple who put down hard-earned mon­ey for his prod­uct, what’s most dis­turb­ing about this announce­ment is the brazen show of — let us call it what it is in light of Google’s cor­po­rate mot­to²—evil.

If Google sim­ply want­ed the tal­ent with­in Spar­row SAS, why not hire the indi­vid­u­als they want­ed? If Google want­ed the prod­uct Spar­row, we would­n’t be hear­ing that it is now dead. No, Google’s ben­e­fit here is that they get to take off the mar­ket a piece of soft­ware which attract­ed users to Apple prod­ucts, a piece of soft­ware whose cre­ators pre­vi­ous­ly announced dis­in­ter­est in mak­ing avail­able on Android. Google is using their size and strength to harm their com­pe­ti­tion. Does that sound like the admirable ideals Google claims to espouse in their Cor­po­rate Code of Con­duct?

There is spec­u­la­tion (entire­ly on Android-cen­tric web­sites) that Google bought Spar­row for the tech­nol­o­gy con­tained in Spar­row. This spec­u­la­tion sug­gests that per­haps Google wants to use Spar­row’s code­base for what Spar­row orig­i­nal­ly was: a bet­ter Gmail client.

Even if true, it is unlike­ly at best that Google will release a client for iOS or Android or MacOS or even Win­dows that has POP or IMAP sup­port for email servers oth­er than Gmail. So this is like­ly to be more than an attack on users of Apple prod­ucts; it’s an out­right attack on any­one using any email serv­er not owned by Google.

For the time being I will like­ly con­tin­ue using Spar­row. But I will be chang­ing the default sig­na­ture from «Sent from Spar­row» to «Sent from the best email client ever to be killed by Google.»