Mailbox and Sunrise, two productivity apps that I liked, got acquired (Dropbox 2013, Microsoft 2015), and discontinued in 2015.
Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox
11–20 of 435 posts
Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox
#12Another one bites the dust...
I still remember the discussion when the acquisition was announced:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5381572
I hope it was really not going anywhere.
Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox
#13I would have guessed Mailbox could have been sold instead of shuttered. Maybe MAU has slid lately, but I thought they had a lot of happy users.
On the other hand, it's amusing to note the Valley inflation that has happened since Mailbox was acquired in early 2013. It was for ~$100M which seems like chump change in the Age of The Unicorn that we now find ourselves in.
Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox
#14Wow - feels bad for those folks that got acqui-hired and now see their product being "laid off" RIP Mailbox, you were cool to play with for a few hours that one stormy day I decided to install you
Mailbox/Orchestra was not an acquihire for pennies; it was a normal acquisition for $100 million: http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/15/mailbox-cost-dropbox-around...
Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox
#15Ugh. Yet another intriguing email startup being acquihired and killed off by a more-established tech company (see also: Sparrow). It's 2015 and I still bounce around email clients every couple months because all of the major options have substantial flaws.
Probably because there simply isn't money to be made in being an e-mail startup.
Or, more correctly, there isn't enough money to be made to satisfy VC investors. Mailbox and the like could have lived quite comfortably as paid-for apps with comfortable but small levels of profit, but that isn't what Silicon Valley rewards.
EDIT: also, IIRC Apple's restrictions on background processing meant that they needed to have every user's account set up on their servers to process push notifications. Did that ever change? If not that's a non trivial expense/complication to scaling, especially when you're up against an OS-integrated app that doesn't have those restrictions.
Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox
#16So stupid, really! Carousel is the only Dropbox product I use and it works really great!
I was just thinking the same. Uninstalled it after reading the news.
The "free up phone space" feature was too good on my phone (old and limited space)
Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox
#17That is unfortunate. Mailbox was, and still is, (barring a few bugs) one of the better, Zero-inbox mail apps for IOS. Spark by Readdle has taken up slack there, and they look like they're building it in a way that will actually be monetizable.
> Spark
Do you know if they're going to do a desktop version too?
(Or, to be more pessimistic: "How long until that gets acquihired and killed off too?")
Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox
#18I'm now getting nervous about Hackpad. Been using it for years and love it to bits. Another Dropbox acquihire...
Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox
#19Not surprised at all, there hasn't been any updates or improvements in awhile, especially for the desktop app, it's nearly unuseable with its current bugs. Seemed like Dropbox never put enough resources into it for it to really get off the ground.
I've switched to airmail for the time being, but I'm definitely going to miss snoozing emails to specific dates.
Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox
#20Ugh. Yet another intriguing email startup being acquihired and killed off by a more-established tech company (see also: Sparrow). It's 2015 and I still bounce around email clients every couple months because all of the major options have substantial flaws.
What do you not like about Outlook or Gmail (I think the market leaders)?
They don't work with other people's IMAP/POP3 servers?
(Well, the Gmail iOS app certainly doesn't; I haven't tried the Outlook client but the description in the app store suggests a very limited set of providers.)