Categories
Business Development

The Sparrow Acquisition Is A Good Thing

A wonderful boquet of flowers.Selligy Weblog: “This is not a good trend for Apple. Apple is depending on apps like Sparrow to make the iOS platform shine. Excellent apps like Sparrow cost a lot of money to build and maintain. Apple should be working hard to ensure independent app developers can earn even more than top salaries at Google, or they will all be poached away.”

Why should, or would, Apple care about keeping developers around? If someone walked up to me with a big pile of cash and wanted to acquire my popular, or unpopular app, and I felt it was a good thing, I’d do it in a heartbeat. So would a lot of people. This is the American Free Market at its best. A company puts together a group of talented people, creates a product people love, and gets the attention of a bigger company. That bigger company comes along and gobbles up the talent. Sure, as a user of Sparrow you may be a bit bummed, but it won’t last for long. As a little guy just getting started this is an opportunity. It means if I wanted to, I could pick up where Sparrow left off and create a great email client that looks and acts just like it. Filling that hole. Heck, maybe I’ll do something MUCH better. It will happen.

I have a feeling there is a company, or individual, out there today, slinging code in hopes to bring a new Sparrow-like client to life.

That’s pretty exciting.

Categories
Business

Google Acquires Sparrow

“While we’ll be working on new things at Google, we will continue to make Sparrow available and provide support for our users.” – Sparrow

It sounds like Google bought a development team. Hopefully this leads to great new iOS and Android GMail clients.

Here’s hoping.

UPDATE: Oh, wow. From the Sparrow App Store page.

“As the team works on new projects, there will be no new features released for the Sparrow apps, other than minor maintenance and bug fixes.”

Do you think that will kill sales?

UPDATE 2: Matthew Panzarino, of The Next Web, has the best coverage. It includes a statement from Google that pretty much says they bought a development team to work on GMail.