Sparrow, the email client for OS X, just announced they have been acquired by Google. The Sparrow team will join the Gmail team to “accomplish a bigger vision”. Since its release, Sparrow has quickly become one of the most popular mail clients on OS X and, more recently, on the iPhone as well.

From the Sparrow website:

We’re excited to announce that Sparrow has been acquired by Google!

We care a lot about how people communicate, and we did our best to provide you with the most intuitive and pleasurable mailing experience.

Now we’re joining the Gmail team to accomplish a bigger vision — one that we think we can better achieve with Google.

According to the developers, while the product has been acquired by Google, it will continue to be available, and the team will still provide support for its users, at least for the time being.

After the release of the iPhone client, the Sparrow team publicly asked Apple to figure out a solution to let them implement push notifications, which Sparrow wanted to use through a different method than the one enforced by Apple. The Sparrow team stated push was coming with or without Apple, but then suggested push would be coming with a yearly subscription after Apple’s decision not to allow their implementation of push notifications.

Recently, Sparrow also announced they were working on an iPad application. However, in an email the team just sent to existing customers, they wrote:

as we’ll be busy with new projects at Google, we do not plan to release new features for the Sparrow apps.

On the other hand, Google’s own Gmail app has always been heavily criticized (in spite of its improvements) for its performances and reliance on web views instead of “native” code in several interactions with navigation, message search, and more. In theory, the acquisition of Sparrow should hint at a major update to the official Gmail offerings for iOS coming in the future, although, obviously, the details are not clear at this point.

Interestingly enough, while Sparrow does have clients for both iPhone and OS X, Google has never offered an official Gmail application for the Mac. Similarly, one of the most prominent features of Sparrow is its ability to pull contacts’ profile pictures from Facebook, a kind of integration we assume would be going away in an hypothetical Google-owned version of Sparrow, replaced by Google+ support for avatars. Again, the same would apply for Dropbox and CloudApp, both of which are file sharing services supported by Sparrow; theoretically, Google would want to replace those features with Google Drive, their service for sharing and collaborating on documents online.

For a background on Sparrow, check out our latest coverage of the Mac client, our review of Sparrow for iPhone, and initial impressions with the Google Gmail app.

Update: A Google spokesperson has provided MacStories with a statement on Sparrow’s acquisition.

The Sparrow team has always put their users first by focusing on building a seamlessly simple and intuitive interface for their email client. We look forward to bringing them aboard the Gmail team, where they’ll be working on new projects.

The Sparrow team has been busy rolling out updates for its iPhone app, but a new version of their popular Mac email client is available today on the Mac App Store, and it adds a series of long-requested features and fixes. If you’re still running a POP account, for instance, Sparrow 1.6 will finally let you configure it — this is a functionality “Sparrow switchers” have been asking since day one, but it took the team a while to properly implement it alongside support for Gmail and regular IMAP. If you’re still rocking a Hotmail account via POP and have been looking for ways to get those emails into Sparrow, now’s the time to update.

Version 1.6, however, comes with other improvements and fixes to enhance the performances and overall stability of the app, as well as usability in some areas. A minor yet welcome change in my Sparrow workflow, for instance, is the new “Empty Spam” button that allows me to flush undesired messages with a single click.

Another small change, but a new “Inbox Zero” message now greets you when nothing else is awaiting reply in your inbox. It’s the little things.

Also in Sparrow 1.6, there is a “true unified inbox” that lets you navigate all your drafts, starred messages, and sent emails directly from your unified account. Among the other changes, the tab key in the composer view now lets you toggle down from ‘To’, ‘Subject’ to ‘From’; hitting Esc on Quick Reply will save a draft; and a new Shift-cmd-option-M shortcut toggles the Extended Sidebar (so you can easily switch to a Twitter-like layout with profile pictures and icons instead of labels).

Make sure to check out the Sparrow blog for a full list of fixes and improvements in 1.6. Sparrow for Mac continues to be a staff favorite here at MacStories for its clever combination of social features, intuitive gestures, and customization options, and for this update, the Sparrow team kindly donated 20 promo codes to MacStories readers. You can get Sparrow for Mac at $9.99 on the Mac App Store, or you can enter our giveaway and try to win one of the 20 copies up for grabs. Details below.

Sparrow for Mac Giveaway

To enter the giveaway, tweet the following message before 11.59 AM PDT (May  18th, tomorrow):

Win a copy of Sparrow for Mac on MacStories: http://mcstr.net/Jktamq

We will search Twitter.com for tweets and retweets and randomly pick up the winners. Make sure to follow @macstoriesnet on Twitter so we can get in touch with you once the giveaway is over. If you want to increase your odds of winning, you can also leave a comment to this post.

Winners will be announced on Saturday (May 19th). Good luck!

Sparrow 1.1 brought minor enhancements to the best alternative email client for iPhone, including a built-in browser and a Send & Archive option. Sparrow 1.2, released today, adds much-requested support for landscape mode to an email app that, in this new version, also lets you manage email labels and folders.

I have been testing Sparrow 1.2, and while I am no fan of landscape mode on iOS (I never use such functionality on the iPhone), I recognize how some users are going to perform some serious typing for their email replies thanks to Sparrow 1.2. The whole compose interface has been updated to take advantage of the different orientation.

Two features that I have been enjoying in Sparrow 1.2 are proper label/folder management, and improved navigation between messages. The latter brings a nicer, cleaner design to the message “preview” you get when pulling a message up to reveal the next one. Folder/label management, on the other hand, now lets Sparrow directly create, edit, and delete labels or folders without leaving the app to use a web interface or desktop client.

I have tested the feature with Gmail (both regular and Google Apps accounts) and iCloud, and I was pleased to see Sparrow differentiated visually between labels (for Gmail) and folders (for iCloud mail). Because label management has been implemented in the mid panel — the one Sparrow uses to list an account’s mailboxes — you won’t be able to swipe-to-delete; instead, management has been assigned to a new “Edit” button that shows up in the Folders or Labels sections of a single account.

Meanwhile, the Sparrow team has also confirmed that Apple won’t allow them to implement push notifications through the VoIP framework, as they did in early betas of the app. Sparrow will have to build notification support on the server’s side, and the developers confirm this will require a yearly subscription for Sparrow users willing to use push notifications. Previously, the Sparrow developers said push support would be coming “with or without Apple”.

With proper label management, landscape mode, localization in 9 additional languages, and bug fixes, Sparrow for iPhone continues its march towards becoming the best email client for iPhone. You can find Sparrow 1.2 on the App Store today.

Sparrow for iPhone, the alternative email client for iPhone I reviewed three weeks ago, has an update on the App Store today, adding a number of functionalities that didn’t make it into version 1.0 of the software. Sparrow 1.1 allows you to show or hide the dock badge per account, open links through a built-in web browser (which includes options to open in Safari, and mail a link), and selectively choose which folders or labels to show in the app. There are new actions to empty trash or spam, and you can now activate a Send & Archive option in the Settings to instantly archive a message or conversation as you send a new email.

About push, which had to be removed from the final version of Sparrow 1.0 — the developers tested push notifications while the app was in beta, and they worked well, but Apple didn’t approve the implementation — the developers are confident Apple will revise its position. They will submit version 1.2 of the app soon, re-including support for push notifications. And if Apple won’t approve Sparrow with push for the second time, the developers say they are working out a solution to include push in other ways “with or without Apple”. It will be interesting to see whether Sparrow will consider adding push notifications through external services such as Boxcar, which recently raised new funding to build a push notification service for mobile developers. Update: the beta version of Sparrow I tested included push through a method that let the app run in the background leveraging the VoIP API. It’s not clear whether Apple will ever revise its position on letting a non-VoIP app use the VoIP API.

Thanks to your amazing support, we feel confident that Apple might revise its position on the Push API. We’ll submit a first version of Sparrow 1.2 including it. This might delay Sparrow 1.2 validation but we’re already working with some partners to include Push in future versions of Sparrow without needing Apple clearance.

Sparrow 1.2 for iPhone will also include landscape support, 9 more languages, and a gesture to swipe up or down between messages. The team is also working on Sparrow 1.6 for Mac, which will bring fixes and POP support.

Sparrow is a fantastic email client for iPhone, as I’ve already detailed in my review, and this 1.1 release adds some nice features that didn’t make the cut in the original 1.0. You can find Sparrow 1.1 on the App Store today.

Back in 2006, when Apple was still rumored to be working on a revolutionary mobile phone, many wondered if such device would be able to do core tasks like email and messaging as well as RIM’s BlackBerry. Months later, when the iPhone was officially announced at Macworld, the introduction of the device alone led some people to write that it was “already impacting its new competitors” — namely RIM, and its BlackBerry line of phones that had captured a great portion of corporate America. Yet, those people were right: the numbers are speaking for themselves now, and the many issues behind RIM’s poor management and marketing choices can be traced back to the iPhone’s introduction.

At Macworld 2007, a healthy-looking Steve Jobs said: “This is a day I’ve been looking forward to for two and half years. Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. […] Today we’re introducing three revolutionary products of this class.

Today Apple is going to reinvent the phone”.

Looking back at that day now, it’s a shared sentiment among those who have been following Apple for the past years that Steve touched his highest point in presentation style and product-unveiling skills with that keynote. Because while Steve may no longer be with us today, his words still resonate stronger than ever. On that day, Apple did reinvent the phone. And as it turns out, the revolution wasn’t just about multitouch and elegant hardware design.

It was about the software.

Later on during that keynote, Steve arrived at the third section of the presentation and iPhone feature set, which was also described as an “Internet communications device”. The first item in that slide was Rich HTML email — “for the first time, really rich email on a mobile device”, he said. Sure enough, the iPhone’s Mail app was demoed on stage to show off its rich HTML-parsing capabilities, which included inline images, rich text, support for phone numbers and web links, and more. When the iPhone went on sale six months later, on June 29, and debuted online to rave reviews from the press, many praised its email capabilities, among other things.

But then something happened in the following months. As Apple kept adding features to iPhone and refining its core apps including Mail, users and developers began wondering when Apple would allow for third-party apps to be installed on the device. For as much as Apple was adding new functionalities and fixes, there are always niches and sub-markets that Apple can’t address in new software releases — corporate email was one of them, as, admittedly, that were still several things Apple wasn’t adding to its email client to please business users from corporate environments. When Apple did confirm its plans to open up iPhone OS and offer an App Store, users wondered if it would be possible, like it still is on a Mac, to install replacements for the “core apps”, such as the browser, email client, or calendar application. In a somewhat unexpected and much criticized turn of events, Apple made it clear to developers that it would not accept third-party apps duplicating the functionality of build-in iPhone applications.

John Gruber has a good recollection of the events from 2008 — case in point MailWrangler, an email app that was rejected at the time.

I have a theory. It is more, well, emotional than logical. But it’s the only theory I can think of that makes any sense at all and fits the available evidence. The theory is that there is an unpublished rule that Apple — and in this case, where by “Apple” I really mean “Steven P. Jobs” — will not publish third-party apps that compete with or replace any of the four apps in the iPhone’s default “dock”: Phone, Mail, Safari, and iPod.

In the following years, in spite of App Store-related controversies showing up every once in a while, developers more or less “understood” how Apple’s approval process worked, and kept working on apps that would be “safe” for sale within Apple’s rules. Publishing a set of guidelines certainly helped in making things clear for everyone, but new apps that belonged to categories not mentioned in the guidelines would still appear in the App Store, forcing Apple to revise its guidelines or impose new limits. This often happens after new iOS technologies are made available to developers — a recent example is the banning of Notification Center utilities. However, one thing has been clear since MailWrangler’s rejection in 2008: full replacements for Apple’s system apps can’t be developed for the App Store. Developers can use the frameworks behind system features to develop third-party apps: Address Book companions, Calendar utilities, photo editing apps — these are all built using APIs and frameworks available publicly. The same has been true for browsers, which have to use Safari’s rendering engine, and alternative mail clients, which haven’t been exactly popular on the App Store, with the exception of Google’s Gmail app — an app that, however, is based on web views.

Today marks an important day in the history of the App Store. For the first time, Apple is letting a third-party developer sell a full-featured, custom email client that uses its proprietary email engine to iPhone users. Sparrow, already popular on the Mac and available on the Mac App Store, comes to the iPhone’s App Store today, and it promises to offer a newer, fresh take on email to lure back customers whose only choice since 2007 has been Apple’s Mail.app. (more…)

Sparrow, last updated with CloudApp integration (for large email attachments) and pull-to-refresh with version 1.4, has reached a milestone this morning with their 1.5 update now available on the Mac App Store. In this release, Sparrow continues to integrate Gmail natively with optional loading of remote images and token based searching for messages.

(more…)

If you’ve been yearning for a good, native, Gmail app for the iPhone, you might not have to wait much longer. MG Siegler claims that Google “is on the verge of launching their native Gmail app” and have likely already submitted it to Apple for review.

Although Google has a good web version of Gmail that is optimised for the iPhone and is also supported by iOS’ inbuilt Mail app, many have long wanted a fully native Gmail app and experience on iOS. Probably the biggest reason for a native Gmail app is push notifications (in the native Mail app, Gmail only supports fetching every 15, 30 or 60 minutes). Yet according to Siegler’s sources, the app is also “pretty fantastic” – something that many users of Android’s Gmail app have also often commented on. His understanding is that this is Google’s first iOS app since they began their recent commitment to design and that “all indications point to it being a good [app]“.

The native Gmail app will likely bring other key functionality as well: like Priority Inbox and one-click starring of messages. Other possibilities include some of the stuff Google is about to roll out for Gmail proper: like contact icons, better threading, and deep searching functionality. Maybe there will even be some Google+ integration, which Google is also hard at work on for Gmail.

The big question is whether Apple will approve the app, because to date they have rejected alternative email apps that would compete against the native Mail app. However, Siegler believes Apple probably will approve it, in which case it could mean that we could also soon see other third party Mail apps on iOS. One such example could be Sparrow for iPhone, after the developers revealed in August they have started development on such an app. In an interview with Business Insider in August, Dominique Leca from Sparrow noted that it would be highly inconsistent for Apple to continue to reject alternative Mail apps when Apple has since allowed replacements for Safari on iOS in recent months.

[Via parislemon]

Sparrow, the minimal email client for the Mac that recently gained with full Lion compatibility, received a new update in the Mac App Store, this time adding native integration with file sharing service CloudApp, a “pull to refresh” gesture to check for new messages, and a number of fixes and improvements aimed at enhancing the email experience and make it faster and more stable.

With CloudApp support, users are now able to drag & drop files into Sparrow’s compose window, and have the app automatically upload them to CloudApp and insert a clickable link in the message. Once authenticated with your CloudApp account in Sparrow’s preferences, every time you’d like to send an attachment through CloudApp, you won’t need to have CloudApp installed on your Mac: Sparrow will directly communicate with CloudApp’s servers and upload the file for you. The UI for this action is very simple — the top section of the message is a CloudApp “drop zone”, while the lower part at the bottom is for classic email attachments as explained by the developers in this article. There is a new cloud indicator in the top toolbar of the compose window to show the status of an upload, which will turn blue after it’s complete. Overall, CloudApp integration is well done, simple and useful if you share with CloudApp on a daily basis.

Sparrow 1.4 also comes with the “pull to refresh” gesture made popular by Loren Brichter’s Tweetie on the iPhone years ago, and later implemented by thousands of other App Store apps. In Sparrow, you can pull the inbox to check for new messages, and whilst I don’t think I’ll ever use this functionality as I like my email client to stay in the background and refresh every few minutes automatically, I assume some people who want to manually check for new messages will like this option.

As usual with every Sparrow update, there’s a series of bug fixes and improvements under the hood. Sparrow now syncs and sends emails faster than before, and Gmail-like reverse threads have been implemented in the conversation view. Sparrow is now compatible with Zoho and Lotus Domino, it’s got a new draft management system and the mail database has been improved, too.

Sparrow 1.4 can be considered a minor update, but it’ll make those who rely on CloudApp for their file sharing needs more efficient when dealing with email. You can get Sparrow 1.4 on the Mac App Store.