Microsoft is shutting down Sunrise Calendar

Sunrise has announced in a blog post that it is shutting down its popular calendar app on August 31st. The news follows the company’s acquisition by Microsoft in 2015.

According to the post, the team at Sunrise have shifted all of its focus to the development of Microsoft Outlook for Android and iOS, making it impossible to continue support of the Sunrise app.

“…We’re not able to support and update Sunrise anymore. No new features. No bug fixes. For us, that’s the definition of a lousy app and it’s not a user experience we want to leave you with.”

On the plus side, since the acquisition the Outlook app has received some welcome updates and features courtesy of the Sunrise team. Improved daily events view, and more clarity in viewing relevant information pertaining to events have been welcome additions to the Outlook app. As of now, Outlook has adopted most of the popular features that Sunrise boasted, including integration with other calendar apps and custom event icons.

Microsoft has been hoping to align the Outlook mobile platform with its PC, being a single destination for contacts, calendar, and email. Since the acquisition, it is one step closer and Outlook is a solid calendar app for anyone.

However, if you are looking for an alternative to Sunrise and want to stay away from Outlook, here are a few alternatives I recommend:

Google Calendar: The trusted Google stock calendar does an excellent job of keeping you organized. It has some robust features and deep Android integration that appeal to those purists among us.

Cal by Any.do: A solid and very pretty calendar app that boasts some productivity tools and handy widgets to keep you on task.

SolCalendar by Kakao Corp: The best looking of these apps, SolCalendar offers a ton of features including weather briefs, goal-keeping tools and map integration to give you a complete picture of your day.