Sunrise Sets With a Fresh Outlook

One of the top calendar apps for iOS and Android, Sunrise has long been a favourite of mine for its simplicity but also its ability to connect to a number of different sites (Office 365, Outlook, Exhange, Google Calendar, iCloud Calendar, Facebook, Wunderlist, Google Tasks, Evernote, Trello…The list goes on).

However, last year, it was purchased by Microsoft, and it was only a matter of time before it was subsumed into the larger whole (or should that be hole), much as another favourite, Tweetdeck, is being slowly swallowed by Twitter.

The time has now come, where development has stopped on Sunrise and its functionality will be switched off completely on 31st August. The team behind it, according to their blog, are working closely with the Microsoft Outlook team to bring the same functionality to Outlook on Android and iOS. We can only hope that this move doesn’t result in the loss of some of the key functionality and design that Sunrise gave us, either in an interim period after August, or worse still, forever.

Having watched Twitter slowly remove functionality from Tweetdeck in the mistaken belief that Twitter does it better (or more likely with the intention of driving Tweetdeck users to the Twitter platform), I am waiting with trepidation to see the results of the merge of Sunrise into Outlook.