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The trouble with relying on free things

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Screenshot of the announcement that Sunrise is no longer in development

For some years now, I’ve been a user of Sunrise. It started off as a daily email with your events from Google Calendar and Facebook, but over time it evolved into a series of mobile and desktop apps, and a web site, where you could combine all of your various calendars together in one, intuitive interface. This meant that you could have events from Google, iCloud, and any Exchange server, all combined together with your Evernote reminders, gigs from Songkick, Eventbrite bookings, TripIt itineraries and more besides.

It was great, but at no point did Sunrise ever ask for money. Surely it must have cost money to run, and funding from venture capital only goes so far. So I wasn’t all that surprised when, earlier this year, Sunrise announced its acquisition by Microsoft. At the time, they promised to keep everything running, and for free.

At first, there were promising developments. Integration with Wunderlist, another recent Microsoft acquisition, a new keyboard for iOS and Android designed to help you plan meetings whilst in another app, and support for the Apple Watch are all additions made following Microsoft’s takeover. But then the Sunrise team dropped a bombshell this week: development of all of Sunrise’s apps has ceased.

Sunrise’s development team have joined the team working on Outlook for mobile devices. Mobile Outlook was also the result of an outside purchase by Microsoft, this time of Acompli. As you’d expect, the aim of the integration of the Sunrise developers is to improve Outlook’s calendaring capabilities, and, sure enough, a new version of Outlook for iOS was released this week. There’s a bit more background on the Microsoft Office blog, and an update for Android is due soon too.

As it stands, Outlook isn’t yet capable of doing all of the things that Sunrise can do, and so the Sunrise apps will still be available to download for a little while longer. But once Outlook has fully absorbed Sunrise’s features, I expect the apps will be withdrawn.

For me, this is a bit of a bummer. I used both Sunrise and Outlook on my iPhone and iPad; Sunrise to manage all of my calendars, and Outlook for my work email. I deliberately keep my work and personal email separate, and, crucially, don’t have notifications turned on for work messages. My job doesn’t require me to be reachable out of hours; therefore, whilst it’s useful to be able to use my phone to access work email whilst at work or in an emergency, I want to be able to completely ignore it away from work. But I do like to be able to see my work calendars outside of work, and get a holistic view of my diary across both personal and work calendars.

I won’t be able to do this once Sunrise has gone. If I make Outlook my primary calendar app, then it’ll have all of my work emails in there, whether I want to see them or not. Outlook on iOS, as it stands, is still an email client first and foremost; opening the app takes you to your email inbox by default.

So, reluctantly, I decided to take the nuclear option and delete Sunrise from my devices. Sure, it’ll carry on working for a while – probably. But it’ll disappear eventually and I don’t want to be hanging on to a product during its deathrattle.

For now, I’ve gone back to the built-in iOS calendar, which is okay, I guess. Part of the reason why I switched to Sunrise was its superior interface when compared to the stock iOS calendar in iOS 6 and below. More recent versions have been less ugly, but it’s still not got a great user experience even in iOS 9.1, in my opinion. I’m open to suggestions of alternatives – I may give Fantastical a shot, which is £3.99 on iPhone and £7.99 on iPad, both sold separately.

I suppose I shouldn’t have put so much faith in a free service which has no obvious income from users or advertisers. And I think that’s a good lesson in general – if you can’t work out the business model for something, it’s probably best not to rely on it.

How to use Google Sync without using Exchange

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In a blog post on its official blog called ‘Winter cleaning‘, Google announced that it was shutting down some of its services. They are all features which have either been replaced with something (supposedly) better, or are only used by a small number of people and are therefore not worth keeping. This includes Google Sync, which allows the use of Microsoft Exchange protocols for synchronising Gmail, Google Contacts and Google Calendar.

Unfortunately, Exchange is what myself and a number of others use on the iPhone, as it’s the easiest way to synchronise mail, contacts and calendars at the same time. Now Google isn’t dropping Exchange support completely – users of Gmail and free Google Apps accounts (which recently closed to new sign-ups) can continue using it but won’t be able to set it up on new devices; paid Google Apps users will be able to carry on with no problems.

But it’s clear that Exchange support is not a priority for non-paying users like me and so it’s probably best to look at alternatives. Google is, refreshingly, pushing open standards instead – IMAP for email, CalDAV for calendars and CardDAV for contacts. Luckily for iPhone users like me, Apple supports all three, although Windows Phone users aren’t so lucky.

So, here’s how to replace your Exchange-based Google settings with IMAP, CalDAV and CardDAV:

Step 1: Remove the Exchange account

Open Settings, choose Mail, Contacts and Calendars, select your Google Account which is using Exchange, and then select Delete Account. This will remove all contacts, calendars and emails that have been synchronised so I would ensure you have backed your phone up first, just in case there are any problems.

Step 2: Set up a new Gmail account

You should now add your Gmail account in the standard way, by choosing ‘Add Account’ in Mail, Contacts and Calendars and then tapping the Gmail logo. This will set up email and calendar sync, using IMAP and CalDAV respectively, but not contacts.

Step 3: Set up a CardDAV account to synchronise contacts

Going back to the ‘Add Account’ screen, tap ‘Other’ and then ‘Add CardDAV Account’. In server, enter ‘google.com’, your Google Account username and password, and a description – I called mine ‘Google Contacts’.

Now, open the Mail, Contacts and Calender apps on your iPhone in turn to download the data again, which may take a couple of minutes. And then that’s it – you should be back to where you started.

If you find that some of your calendars are missing, open Mobile Safari and browse to https://www.google.com/calendar/syncselect – this will allow to select which calendars are synchronised over CalDAV. The changes will take effect the next time you open the Calendars app, after a few seconds.

These instructions are a bit long-winded and it would be nice if the iPhone’s Gmail support included Contacts as well (which would make step 3 unnecessary). However, considering Apple’s uneasy relationship with Google of late I can’t see this being a priority for them, especially as these features duplicate Apple’s iCloud.