Microsoft acquired the Sunrise calendar app more than a year ago for a sum of at least $100 million. Sunrise, which is free to download from the Google Play Store and Apple's App Store, allows users to gain access to thousands of preloaded calendars which they can populate with events in their own calendars from different online accounts and platforms.
Sunrise has been a very helpful tool for its users due to its functionality and the convenience that it provides. Unfortunately, Sunrise is nearing its end, with the team behind the app planning its shutdown.
In a blog post, the Sunrise team wrote that since the app was acquired by Microsoft, they have moved on to work with the Outlook team. While it is a thrilling moment for the developers to work on an app with the scale of Outlook, the bad news is that they are no longer able to support and update Sunrise.
With no bug fixes and no new features being planned for Sunrise and the team focusing on Outlook, they decided that such a user experience is not what they would want the users of the app to have. As such, the team has decided to pull out Sunrise from app stores over the coming days, with the app to be shut down on Aug. 31.
The Sunrise team, however, noted that they have been working to bring the best features of Sunrise to the Outlook apps, with the team hoping that Sunrise users will transfer to using Outlook for its calendar functions once Sunrise is taken down.
The developments are in line with the plans that Microsoft has previously mentioned, with the integration of Sunrise's technology into the Outlook mobile apps for Android and iOS signaled in October 2015.
Microsoft executives have said that they would be keeping Sunrise functioning until all of the calendar app's features have been integrated into the Outlook apps. With the Sunrise shutdown and the completion of the migration to the new Outlook interface and infrastructure planned for the same time, it would be logical to think that what the Microsoft executives said was true.
