Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox • Hacker News Board

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#131

Post by omaranto » Mon, Dec 07, 2015, 6:10 PM UTC

rifung wrote: post #98

Can anyone explain to me, someone who's more than happy with GMail, what these apps offer that aren't being offered by Google/Microsoft? It seems like Mailbox had a loyal following but I guess my email use is just not sophisticated enough to understand.

I didn't use Mailbox, but I think one of the key features is the snooze button, that makes an email disappear from your inbox and then reappear later. I think at the time Mailbox came out Google didn't offer that feature. The GMail webapp still doesn't have it but now Google Inbox does.

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#132

Post by softawre » Mon, Dec 07, 2015, 6:10 PM UTC

ckluis wrote: post #107

grinich wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey there-- I work at Nylas. We've structured our business to... actually have a business. Our team spent the first year selling APIs to developers [1] which already power lots of paid apps. The N1 mail app we released two months ago[2] follows this and will have paid features next year. Plus both are open source free software, and quite popular on GitHub. [3] [1] https://nylas.com/features/ [2] https://nylas.com/n1…

I’d pay to have delete actually delete email completely (not just from my inbox, but from all as well).

What?

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#133

Post by austenallred » Mon, Dec 07, 2015, 6:11 PM UTC

unfamiliar wrote: post #88

calgoo wrote: post #39

I wish they could open source Mailbox at least... That way it might survive. [1] "Will Mailbox be open-sourced? Unfortunately not. We gave a lot of thought to open-sourcing the underlying system, but this is ultimately not something we will support." [1] https://www.mailboxapp.com/faq/

"We gave a lot of thought to open-sourcing the underlying system, and none of that thought will be elaborated on here."

I'll elaborate on their behalf: "That would be hard and expensive and we have money to make."

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#134

Post by mark_l_watson » Mon, Dec 07, 2015, 6:11 PM UTC

xrjn wrote: post #28

What are the chances that these go down the path of HackPad and be turned into open source projects? I think it's a win-win situation if companies, such as Google and now Dropbox: let go of the responsibility of maintaining it and allow the project to live on in the hands of the community.

Good idea. I was bummed out when Google Wave was cancelled, then happy when I found out how easy it was to run the derivative Apache Wave on my own server, then bummed again when friends and family did not want to use my Apache Wave instance because of the limited network effect (i.e, not enough people were using it).

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#135

Post by dutchbrit » Mon, Dec 07, 2015, 6:12 PM UTC

Time to make an open-source replacement?

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#136

Post by TeMPOraL » Mon, Dec 07, 2015, 6:12 PM UTC

jethro_tell wrote: post #40

untog wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ev…

Also, it's not 'disruptive' which isn't very sexy. At the same time, no one's really disrupted email (probably since gmail) and even sms for the most part, as a form of communication because they are the only cross platform with a very low barrier to entry. Note that all the sms replacement apps still use sms as a fall back since it's a shit show of walled garden apps.

I'm starting to believe that any idea of "disrupting" communications via a private company should be culled in its infancy. Market can't do infrastructure. Most companies will do their utmost to lock you in, and then abandon the product as soon as it's even marginally more profitable to do something else. Doubly so with Internet startups, for which the barrier to exit is incredibly low.

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#137

Post by benburton » Mon, Dec 07, 2015, 6:12 PM UTC

Good to hear it's finally official. The Mac desktop app has been unusable for the past 6 months.

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#138

Post by tvararu » Mon, Dec 07, 2015, 6:16 PM UTC

I felt this coming given my experience using the Mailbox desktop app since it launched:

- Good experience, fairly regular releases, stability increasing with each one.

- Stagnation in releases, but app is in a fairly good working state.

- Out of the blue, big update comes in, application changes completely. For the worse, as it loses a bunch of features and is sporting a far less polished look and finish. I believe the new version is now an OS X native application as opposed to a webview.

- Frantic releases over the following weeks, killing some bugs but introducing more.

- Stagnation in releases, in its fairly broken state.

- This announcement.

From the outside, it looks like a case of an engineering team that decided it would rewrite the application from scratch in the native stack. Widely regarded as a bad idea. [1]

After numerous months spent burning money in refactoring and rebuilding features that already existed and worked, management pressure builds up, and they decide to release their "good enough" native version. After torturous weeks of back to back frantic releases to fix all of the complaints coming in, some factor or another (developer churn possibly) caused them to cease development and decide to sack the project altogether.

This is of course just speculation, a narrative I made up. That's how it looks like from the outside to me, but I'd like to hear from the developers inside, since I know they must be reading this thread.

I loved this application and I'm saddened to have to move away from it.

[1] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?RewriteCodeFromScratch

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#139

Post by Spooky23 » Mon, Dec 07, 2015, 6:17 PM UTC

schneidmaster wrote: post #3

Ugh. 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.

Everyone want to "fix" email, and replace it with some proprietary bullshit. Email isn't broken.

Re: Dropbox closing Carousel and Mailbox

#140

Post by SneakerXZ » Mon, Dec 07, 2015, 6:17 PM UTC

It is no surprise, when one-product companies do other products they don't last for long.

Only reason why I still use Dropbox is their client for Mac and and simple web interface and some other small features. I don't understand why nobody else is able to do it...