Sunrise Calendar

» see sunrise.am as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

sunrise calendar passed through the indie-app-of-the-year cycle in 2014 without ever landing on my phone. i was on android by then. the apps that mattered were the ones the engineering team at work was using on their dev machines, and most of those did not include a calendar app at all. sunrise was an iphone product first, in the way every well-funded app of its year was an iphone product first.

pierre valade and jeremy le van shipped sunrise from new york in february 2013 with paris in their accents. it was the calendar app the iphone should have come with, the one that pulled google calendar and microsoft exchange into the same screen with a layout designers actually liked. by mid-2014 the press had stopped covering it as a startup launch and started covering it as the calendar app, full stop. ten million people had it on their phones.

microsoft bought the company on february 11, 2015 for around one hundred million dollars. the announcement said the team would keep building sunrise as a standalone app while feeding their work into outlook mobile. on october 28, 2015 microsoft retracted the first half of that promise, announcing the standalone app would be retired. the actual shutdown got pushed twice and finally landed on september 13, 2016, after the outlook mobile update with the sunrise-derived calendar interface had shipped.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

the unique thing about sunrise was that it treated a calendar like a thing a designer should care about. animations were soft and every event card showed enough context to make the next half hour of your life legible at a glance. for an app-store product in 2013 that was real work, since calendars were a category nobody had bothered making nice since the introduction of the original ical.

the team also figured out connectors before connectors were a thing. you could hook trello into it. you could hook songkick concert subscriptions into it. it was an early version of the everything-bucket calendar that microsoft and google would both later build into their default products, except that in 2014 it was the only mobile app doing it.

~ the postmortem ~

microsoft had bought acompli for outlook a few weeks earlier, and the playbook for both acquisitions was the same. fold the indie team into the outlook mobile org and let the standalone app starve while the team built the same features into the corporate product. with sunrise that took eighteen months. with wunderlist it took five years. the team did not fight the timeline, since the founders were already on the new outlook payroll.

the shutdown was delayed once from the original august 31 date to september 13 to coincide with the outlook mobile update that contained the new calendar interface. on september 13, 2016 the sunrise app stopped working on every platform it shipped on, and the website redirected to the outlook mobile download page.

~ the inheritance ~

pierre valade went on to found jumbo privacy in 2018, an app for managing the privacy settings on your social accounts. jeremy le van stayed at microsoft for the long arc of the outlook mobile rebuild, and the calendar interface that shipped in outlook mobile in late 2016 was the closest thing to sunrise that survived, with the same card layout for events and the same connectors, only with the sunrise name removed from every screen.

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