The company wants to focus exclusively on Outlook

May 11, 2016 17:17 GMT  ·  By

It was only a matter of time until this happened, but it’s now official: Microsoft is shutting down the Sunrise calendar app for Android and iOS in order to focus exclusively on Outlook.

Microsoft acquired Sunrise last year, and although the official app continued to be available in the mobile stores, everyone knew that the company wanted to remove it completely and introduce functionality available in the app in its new Outlook client that’s also offered on Android and iOS.

And in an announcement today, the team at Sunrise says that this change is taking place on August 31, when the app will be removed from the store and no other updates will be provided.

“The entire Sunrise team is now working side-by-side with the Outlook team and it’s a thrilling moment for us to work on an app of this scale. Unfortunately, as all good stories go, there’s a sad bit to it: we’re not able to support and update Sunrise anymore,” the Sunrise team said in a post.

“No new features. No bug fixes. For us, that’s the definition of a lousy app and it’s not a user experience we want to leave you with. For this reason, we’ll be removing Sunrise from the app stores in the next few days. On August 31st, we’ll officially shut down the app and it will stop working all together.”

No other Android apps going dark

Microsoft acquired several popular Android and iOS apps last year in an effort not only to become a more important player on rival platforms but also to integrate their functionality into its own apps and eventually bring them on Windows too.

The company, however, assured us that not all purchased apps will be removed from Android and iOS and SwiftKey is one key example. Microsoft took over the most popular third-party keyboard on Android and iOS and explained that the app would continue to be offered to users of rival platforms, with updates and improvements to be released just like before the acquisition.

At the same time, Redmond is also working on WordFlow implementation into SwiftKey, but for the moment, it appears that the keyboard won’t have the same fate as Sunrise.