Microsoft is getting ready to integrate the amazing calendar features of the popular Sunrise app into Outlook for mobile, but the company is taking its time letting Sunrise fans get used to the thought of letting their favorite calendar app go.
For the time being, Microsoft is starting with baby steps to introduce Sunrise into its Outlook apps for iOS and Android. Javier Saltero, corporate vice president for the Outlook team, has announced in a blog post that Outlook's designers have received a little help from the folks of the Sunrise team, which was taken into Microsoft when it bought Sunrise back in February, to give the apps a mobile makeover that makes it simpler for users to access their emails, calendar and contacts all in one app.
"Throughout the app, we focused on improving the small but important details that add up to making Outlook the best designed, most powerful mobile email app available," says Saltero. "We tweaked UI elements by adding visual cues to help you see and process information more quickly at a glance."
On Outlook for iOS, which starts rolling out Wednesday, users will now see more information about events highlighted in their inbox, and they can now RSVP to these events even without opening the email itself. The calendar also gets a visual update with the inclusion of the date in the navigation icon. The Today button will also move as users scroll down to give them an idea of how far they are from today, while days in the past are grayed out.
Outlook for Android, meanwhile, is scheduled for release sometime in early November. As expected, the redesigned app will bring Google's Material Design aesthetic to Outlook, making it more like an integrated part of the Android system than a third-party app. Contact icons will show up next to emails, so users can easily see who emailed them, and icons are more defined to allow users to identify which ones include event invitations, have attachments, or are read or unread.
Clearly, these aren't major changes, but the visual tweaks are the first step toward fully integrating Sunrise features into Outlook. These include Interesting Calendars, linking with third-party apps, and a three-day view, which are all expected to come to Outlook by the end of the year, according to Saltero.
Unfortunately, that also means Sunrise will be permanently shut down, but it makes sense for Microsoft to integrate all the useful email, calendar and contacts features into a single app than spread them all out into three separate apps. After all, email is obviously not going away, despite the rise of messaging apps and other technologies that purport to kill email. Right now, the best way to deal with users' eternally filling up inboxes is to introduce improvements that make dealing with email a lot simpler.
For Microsoft, this strategy appears to be working, with Outlook having registered 30 million monthly active users logging in 1.2 billion email sessions every month. Around one out of five of those users have multiple email accounts on Outlook, suggesting that they use Microsoft's email client for both work and play.
