Sparrow

The mail app people happily paid for, bought by Google and left to rot in the App Store

Acquired & killed
19902026

Sparrow was a mail client for OS X and later iPhone, made by a small French team, that put a Twitter-client interface on top of Gmail and IMAP. It went on sale on 9 February 2011 and was the top paid app on the Mac App Store within a day. Google bought the company on 20 July 2012, development stopped, and the apps were quietly retired.

Timeline [edit]

  1. 2011
  2. 9 February 2011 Launch
    Sparrow for Mac goes on sale

    Top paid app within a day.

  3. 2012
  4. March 2012 Version
    Sparrow for iPhone

    No push notifications allowed.

  5. 20 July 2012 Acquisition
    Google buys Sparrow

    Development stops the same day.

  6. 2013
  7. November 2013 Shutdown
    The apps stop working properly

    Removed from sale.

The site through time

Read the old front page here, in one piece, from our own capture: sparrowmailapp.com, 3 June 2012 →

Browse sparrowmailapp.com as it was, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

2011 2012 2013 Full archive →

Ownership [edit]

Sparrow SAS 2010–2012 Founded Dom Leca and Dinh Viet Hoa, Paris
Google 2012–2013 Acquisition The team joined Gmail; the apps were retired

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: Google bought Sparrow on 20 July 2012 and the team joined the Gmail group. Development stopped the same day apart from critical bug fixes; the apps were pulled from sale and stopped working properly as OS X and iOS moved on. Some of the ideas turned up in Google Inbox in 2014.

Our analysis: Sparrow was the proof that people would pay for a mail client, and then the proof that paying once is not a business. It sold for about ten dollars on the Mac and three on the iPhone, it was the top paid app on the Mac store within a day, and there was no second payment coming from any of those buyers. Apple would not allow push notifications for third-party mail apps without running a server, which the price could not fund. When Google offered money for four people who understood mail interfaces better than almost anyone, the founders took it and told their customers the app would not be developed further. The anger from those customers made the deal a case study in what an acquihire costs the people who bought the product.

History [edit]

Mail that looked like a Twitter client

Dom Leca and Dinh Viet Hoa built Sparrow in Paris on the idea that mail on a Mac did not have to look like a filing cabinet. The window was a narrow list and a message, the way Tweetie showed tweets, with Gmail labels and keyboard shortcuts wired in, drag and drop attachments that could go to Dropbox, and threaded quick replies. After four months of beta it went on sale in the Mac App Store on 9 February 2011 and was the top paid and top grossing app there within a day.

The iPhone version arrived in March 2012 and had the same reception, minus one thing: without push notifications, which Apple did not offer third-party mail apps, you had to open the app to see new mail. Sparrow tried to build the server side that would fix it and found that a one-off App Store price does not pay for a service.

Google buys the team

On 20 July 2012 Sparrow and Google announced the purchase. The team went to the Gmail group, and Leca wrote that the apps would get critical bug fixes but no new features. Paying customers, some of whom had bought both apps weeks earlier, said loudly that they had been left holding software with no future, and the phrase acquihire got its most public airing. The apps stayed on sale for a while, then disappeared; on newer versions of OS X and iOS they broke, and by late 2013 Sparrow was not usable as a daily mail client.

Two years later Google shipped Inbox by Gmail, which several reviewers noted had Sparrow\'s fingerprints on it. Dom Leca left Google and later built Ok Alone and the mail app Spark competitor Sunrise, no relation to the calendar.

The domain today

sparrowmailapp.com is gone. Nothing of the app is available from Apple.

Similar projects

Yahoo Groups Where the internet organised itself 2001–2020 Inbox by Gmail The better Gmail that Gmail ate 2014–2019 Mailbox The email app with the famous reservation queue, bought by Dropbox for about $100 million and shut down three years later 2013–2016 Windows Live Mail The free desktop mail program that replaced Outlook Express, cut off from Outlook.com in 2016 and left to die in 2017 2007–2017 Inbox by Gmail Google's attempt to replace its own mail app, loved by the people who used it and closed after four and a half years 2014–2019 Vine Six seconds, looped forever 2013–2017

Sources [edit]

  1. Sparrow (email client) Wikipedia 1 January 2024 [archived]
  2. Google acquires Sparrow The Verge 20 July 2012
  3. sparrowmailapp.com in the Wayback Machine Internet Archive 1 January 2012

Last verified: 31 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).