What you can’t see on the screenshot is that all the basic interactions were already there. It was fixed a couple of weeks later.īut the basic user experience was a breath of fresh air. Their App Store page was flooded with one-star reviews, saying that they would never use Sunrise because you could only sign up with your Facebook profile.
They basically locked themselves away in Belgium and worked on the version 1 day in and day out.Ī few months and a successful visa applications later, the initial version was available in the App Store: The two co-founders had to move back to Europe while they were applying for a new American visa. Default apps were too powerful.Īnd then, visa issues got in the way. Y Combinator eventually rejected them, saying that a calendar app would never replace the default calendar app on your phone. They flew to San Francisco and pitched in front of multiple Y Combinator partners. Later that fall, they applied to Y Combinator and got to the interview phase. They eventually left and later teamed up with Joey Dong to work on the iOS app. They both were already thinking about leaving Foursquare and turning Sunrise into a native app. Back in October 2012, Valade was working at Foursquare with Jeremy Le Van. There were even a few articles about them here and there. Thousands of people signed up to the Sunrise newsletter. And yet, the default calendar app on iOS 6 hasn’t functionally changed much since then. The iPhone was a tiny 4-inch device (if you had bought the newly introduced iPhone 5), only Microsoft cared about flat design at the time. And it looked like this compared to the default Calendar app: Your event descriptions already included LinkedIn profiles so that you could learn more about the people you were going to meet today. There was a sunrise emoji in the email subject line so you’d spot it more easily in your inbox. Every morning, you’d receive a newsletter with all your calendar events of the day.Įven though it was a pretty basic product, the design was already polished. You could sign up to the Sunrise website by linking you Google Calendar account.
In October 2012, shortly after Hurricane Sandy hit New York, I met up with Pierre Valade in a coffee shop near Columbus Circle because Lower Manhattan was still in the middle of a multi-day power outage. Today sounds like a good time for a post-mortem on Sunrise. Let’s break down what made Sunrise great. While there are many mobile calendar apps out there, none of them come close to Sunrise as they’re not as polished and well-designed. I’ve been looking for a good replacement for a few months. Servers will keep running until more Sunrise features are ported over to Outlook’s calendar feature, then they’ll shut down. Update: Sunrise isn’t shutting down just yet.
Today, the team is shutting down the servers and you won’t be able to use Sunrise as your calendar app anymore.
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