Well here is your Friday afternoon shocker, Sparrow, the alternative email client for both Mac and iOS has been acquired by Google. Sparrow CEO Dom Leca announced on the companies blog page today. This comes as a complete shock, as it almost seem as if this should have been a move Apple should have made, but it looks like if you snooze you lose. Google, according to Leca, will be incorporating Sparrow’s team and presumably their client into the Gmail team. While Leca says that they will continue to provide support for their existing users, no one word has been mentioned if Google plans to release a “desktop” app for Gmail, but one can only assume.
No financials were discussed, but the story is still developing… in the meantime, here’s the letter from Dom Leca.
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
As a user of Sparrow on both my Mac and iPhone (jailbroken of course, to use Sparrow+) I can honestly say this is a great move by Google and Apple should feel threatened.
Update: Leca sent out an email to Sparrow users:
Hello,
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.
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!Dom Leca
CEO
Sparrow
So while support and “critical” updates will be provided, no “new” services will be added, meaning for those of you who purchased Sparrow for iPhone and were patiently waiting for the push service, guess you’re out of luck.