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That’s more than enough for Sunrise to deserve to continue its work. It just took someone else’s job and did it 20 percent better. It didn’t advance our notions of how mobile scheduling should work. (In a great touch, Sunrise imported friends’ profile photos to show you who else was going to events.)Īt the same time, Sunrise offered never really offered much that iOS Calendar didn’t, beyond a pleasing user interface and some useful integrations. It won fans with a variety of smart integrations, including Google Maps for directions and Facebook for parties and birthdays. Sunrise was born in an earlier era, and on the strength of an impressive team and good design sense, raised more than $8 million before Microsoft bought it for an undisclosed sum. Very few companies have or are willing to spend this kind of money, and venture capitalists aren’t likely to invest in them. The second is that it’s going to cost money for you to acquire customers - your best bet is probably to buy installations with ads on Facebook and the App Store. Unless you can continuously acquire thousands of new customers, that’s not a sustainable business.

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The first is that the glut of free calendar apps makes it very difficult for you to charge customers more than a few dollars.

#CALENDARPRO SUNRISE HOW TO#

If you’re a tiny startup with a brilliant idea for how to improve calendars, you face two intractable problems. Notes, to-do lists, address books, calendars: the vast majority settle for the good-enough, preinstalled apps on their phoneĪ glut of free apps makes it a terrible business Writing in The Information this May, Lessin described what he called ' the non-monetizable product blind spot.' 'There are plenty of products people want, but they’re not good businesses,' wrote Lessin, who is currently building a bot company named Fin. Why is this the case? In May, former Facebook executive Sam Lessin offered an answer. printing! The future of scheduling has never looked more like the past. Meanwhile, calendar apps brag that they can now support. And if it finds a better route, it will change up your driving directions on the fly. If there’s an accident up ahead, it will alert you. It will nudge you when it’s time to change lanes. Today your maps app will start your trip by telling you when you will arrive. Mostly the same, right? Now think about your maps app in 2011 - a godsend, to be sure, but a pale imitation of its 2016 counterpart. Think about what your calendar app looked like in 2011 and what it looks like today. Nearly all of these apps rely on Apple's iCloud, Google, or Microsoft Exchange to manage calendar data, and they're limited by what those giants will allow. That was the last meaningful calendar innovation I can remember, and it happened in 2011. I'm a Fantastical man myself, having been drawn in by its natural-language processing: type in nearly any combination of who you're meeting with, and when, and where, and Fantastical turns it into a calendar entry. You use Fantastical, or TimePage, or Bus圜al, and they keep you on time and do it in style. This is the part where you tell me that no, actually, you have a calendar app that works just great. All of it is better than jotting down new appointments on a paper calendar - mostly. Want a slightly different look or feature set? There are dozens of options in the App Store. With some tinkering, you can synchronize your calendar between your phone and your laptop, and in most cases it will work OK. You can create new events, view your daily schedule, and get a buzz in your pocket when it’s time to leave for your next meeting. There’s a calendar app that comes pre-installed on your smartphone, and it works just fine. That’s not to say that calendar apps don’t work. Your calendar hasn't meaningfully improved since the dawn of the App Store The smart money is not invested in calendars, and the result is that your calendar hasn’t meaningfully improved since the dawn of the App Store. The marketplace reflects the insane difficulty of finding customers, and of profiting from them. The state of calendar apps in 2016 is an embarrassment, but it’s a revealing one. And to anyone looking for a next-generation calendar app to serve as its replacement, the awful truth is that there isn’t one. And now Sunrise, which began life as a more socially adept calendar, will now be a feature inside an email app. Microsoft announced its plan to merge Sunrise into Outlook, its mobile email client, last October. Today the sun finally sets on Sunrise, the calendar app that Microsoft acquired last year.

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