Google buys reMail iPhone app, kills it

“As you might have heard earlier today, Google made another acquisition — the email search startup reMail,” MG Siegler reports for TechCrunch. “While its topical description may make it seem like an obvious buy, there’s another layer that makes this really interesting. reMail isn’t just any email search startup, it’s a startup working to perfect email search on the iPhone. Or rather, it was.”

Siegler reports, “Here’s the key part of reMail founder Gabor Cselle’s post about the acquisition today: ‘Google and reMail have decided to discontinue reMail’s iPhone application, and we have removed it from the App Store.’ Yep, it looks like this may be another battle in the Apple-Google mobile war.”

Full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: One down, only 157,512 to go.

35 Comments

  1. So, question – where can this app be had, now that it’s off the app store? I’ve googled every possible combination to find it, even resorting to bing (gasp) and yahoo – I wouldn’t put it past google at this point to censor search results for this type of thing

    So…..anyone know where to snag this app?

  2. Gabriel. Nothing I say confirms anything Google does nor its motivations. It would be really fun if I could though. ” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”smile” style=”border:0;” />

    I do think it is possible for Apple to have incorporated features, similar to reMail’s into iPhone 4.0. Whether they have or not remains to be seen. Apple certainly has the capacity to do it.

    My real point though, is how quickly we are to raise our guns whenever things like this happen. This is not the Cuban missile crisis here, I think we have time for some patience before we go lambasting Google over this acquisition.

    And I apologize for the off topic comparisons. I only meant to illustrate my point with broader examples of a similar nature.

    Have a great day.

  3. What is the big deal here? Doesn’t the iPhone already have system wide Spotlight search? What would another app contribute?

    Maybe Google bought the company, and then canned the iPhone app so that the developers were free to work on the Android version? Maybe, rather than something sinister, Google are more interested in making their product better?

  4. Oh please… Tech companies get bought out all time. It’s a lot more likely that Google wanted the company’s technology to roll into one of their own offerings, patents owned by the company, and/or the company’s talent. This one app getting canceled was a by-product of the overall deal, not Google starting “a war” with Apple.

  5. It’s one thing wanting a startup’s technology, but a whole different ballgame withdrawing it from your major competitor. I hate to say it, but Google is looking more and more like the bully in the schoolyard. (OK, the other bully, but that one has become so bloated he’s not a threat anymore). You can’t just ditch all your founding principles and hope no-one will notice.

  6. If there was/is a demand for this reMail product, then someone else can code it up using the iPhone SDK or iPad SDK and then release it. No big deal in my mind.

    The beauty of the App Store is that the barriers to entry are small, making it unlikely that any company, even a larger one like Google, can stop the flow of software by buying them out. It would be like the finger in the proverbial dike. The App Store has some similarities to eBay in that respect – it makes it much easier for individuals to engage in commerce. The App Store will be the incubator for a whole lot of small businesses.

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