Sunsetting Carousel and Mailbox
Dropbox (Hacker News, MacRumors):
Building new products is about learning as much as it’s about making. It’s also about tough choices. Over the past few months, we’ve increased our team’s focus on collaboration and simplifying the way people work together. In light of that, we’ve made the difficult decision to shut down Carousel and Mailbox.
No matter how much I liked Mailbox — and I really like lots of what Mailbox does — this dependency has always been an inherent flaw, and I don’t think this is adequately explained when setting it up. Most people who use it probably have no idea that their email messages live on a third-party server in between their mail host and their phone.
Didn't realize signing into Mailbox got you an extra gig of Dropbox space. Downloaded app, signed in, deleted app. Now up to 3,5 GB.
When deciding whether or not you can trust an app to stick around, you can’t go by whether or not it was acquired.
You also can’t go by whether or not it’s open source, because open source apps get abandoned.
You can’t go by size of company, because big companies like Google or Apple will retire apps, and small companies will fail — or switch their attention to the app that makes them money but isn’t the one you use.
There are some companies you can rely on: Bare Bones, Panic, and Omni (my employer), for instance.
Even then, you can’t rely on every product, no matter how good, continuing to receive a lot of attention. See Mailsmith, Audion, and OmniWeb. Which is sad, even though overall I’m happy to see those resources directed towards BBEdit, Coda, and OmniFocus.
How hard is it to transition your data to an alternative application should the one you are using be withdrawn?
[…]
A developer’s past actions give good clues to what they may do in the future (e.g. Apple & Google have pulled beloved apps many times).
See also: Upgrade.
Also, Nick Heer:
Sad news from Facebook, too: the part of the company that was responsible for a bunch of fairly unpopular but rather nice apps has been shut down. Most notably, Creative Labs is behind Paper, which has always been a far better Facebook experience than the official Facebook app.
