Big companies acquiring small developers and their apps is usually a good thing. The large company provides additional funding to the developer, allowing for a better app, and more sales. An excellent example of this is Tweetie, which was acquired by Twitter and became the official Twitter for iOS app. Thanks to Twitter’s excellent resources, they where able to make Tweetie even better. This isn’t going to be the case with the latest small dev that was acquired by a large company.

Sparrow, the excellent Mac and iOS email client, was acquired by Google and will be joining their Gmail team. The terms and financials of the agreement were not disclosed, however I’d expect Google paid a pretty penny for Sparrow.

The Verge reached out to Dom Leca, CEO of Sparrow, who also announced that the current Sparrow apps will not get any new features but will still be receiving maintenance/security updates.

You can view our public announcement here, but I wanted to reach out directly to make sure you were aware of the news. We will continue to make available our existing products, and we will provide support and critical updates to our users. However, as we’ll be busy with new projects at Google, we do not plan to release new features for the Sparrow apps.

If you were waiting for Sparrow for the iPad, there hasn’t been any word on whether or not that will launch.

Via: The Verge