Sunrise was so good, Microsoft bought it: On August 31, it's dead

Sometimes, an app comes along that charms the socks off iOS and Android users by virtue of its simplicity and thoughtfulness. Doing that for calendars was Sunrise, handiwork of a start-up that got so much positive attention, Microsoft swept in with an open wallet and snatched the team up back in February last year.

Since then, the Sunrise team has been working on Outlook for iOS and Android, trying to bring a little of that magic to Microsoft's apps. Problem is, while they're busy doing that, they can't keep Sunrise up to date with new features or even bug-fixes.

So, it's been confirmed today that, as of August 31 the Sunrise app will stop working. It'll be removed from the various app stores over the next few days, where it was last updated in June 2015.

"As heartbreaking as this sounds," the team writes today, we're hard at work bringing the magic of Sunrise to the Outlook apps, with all your most loved features – interesting calendars, event icons and calendar apps."

Sunrise found favor by virtue of its breadth of integration, linking in with Facebook's calendar as well as other third-party services such as Todoist, Tripit, and Evernote. It also included a special keyboard, dubbed Meet, which aimed to make finding empty slots on peoples' calendars more straightforward by giving access to the schedule without leaving whatever app was currently loaded.

As of October last year, Microsoft was talking up some of the elements of Sunrise that were being ported to Outlook, including email and cloud storage connection. However, there's no master-list of which features will be carried across overall.

The history of great mobile apps is punctuated with cases where developers have caught the attention of big companies and found themselves getting acquired, and it's common that the software which garnered that interest to be sidelined along the way. In some cases the apps are left to live on as zombies, stuck with the same feature-sets as they had at the point where their developers moved on to bigger things.

While the decision to switch off Sunrise altogether is likely to frustrate its most enthusiastic fans, it's probably better in the long-run for security since the team is upfront about the fact that no bug-fixes or other patches are in its future.

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