End of Development

Some high profile apps have ceased development today in the Mac & iOS ecosystem. Pulp and Wallet by Acrylic and Sparrow, the eponymous email client focused on Gmail. The companies were purchased by Facebook and Google, respectively.

I’m sure the developers are elated. Their users, however, can expect no further feature development (I wouldn’t count on bug fixes, either).

So, if you were a fan of Wallet, you should probably look into migrating to 1Password. And Pulp users may want to look at Reeder. And Sparrow users better get comfy with Apple Mail again.

I think Marco Arment puts it best today:

If you want to keep the software and services around that you enjoy, do what you can to make their businesses successful enough that it’s more attractive to keep running them than to be hired by a big tech company.

Honestly, getting free updates in the App Store all the time is nice on my wallet, but I’d rather have a frictionless paid upgrade path for major releases than to watch great apps fade away.