In 2015, Microsoft made quite a few purchases. Although the one that got a good amount of attention was Sunrise. You see Sunrise was a calendar app that just about everyone loved. It was an app that would bring Google Calendar, Apple’s iCloud calendar and Microsoft’s Outlook calendar all into one place. This is very convenient for those that use multiple calendars. Sunrise was also available on iOS, Mac OS X, Android and the web. So it was available just about everywhere. But it will be disappearing from those app stores in the next few days.
As most of you know, the Sunrise team has been working with the Outlook team over at Microsoft. Essentially integrating all of the features that made Sunrise amazing, into Outlook. The team says that it is a “thrilling moment” for them to work on an app of this scale (on Android they had over a million downloads, Microsoft Outlook is much, much larger). They mention in their blog post today that with all of their time going into Outlook, that means no new updates for Sunrise. That’s not the user experience that they want to leave users with, and understandably so. This means the app will be removed from the various app stores (Mac App Store, Apple App Store and Google Play) in the next few days, although the app will continue to work. On August 31st, the sun will officially set on Sunrise. As the app will no longer work, and be a virtual paper weight.
On the bright side, Sunrise will continue to flourish in Microsoft Outlook, which is part of their office suite of programs. The Sunrise team is hard at work bringing all sorts of new features to the calendar part of Outlook, and should make for an exciting time for those that use Outlook. Microsoft paid $100 million for Sunrise. Which may seem like a ton of money, but it’s well worth it, given what they are getting in return. Their work at Outlook has the same goal as Sunrise did, which was to make “your day-to-day life easier and more enjoyable to manage”. Microsoft Outlook is available for Android, if you wish to give it a try.