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Google Buys iPhone Search App, Kills It
Hugh Pickens writes "PC World reports that Google has acquired a popular iPhone application called reMail that provides 'lightning fast' full-text search of your Gmail and IMAP e-mail accounts. The app downloads copies of all your e-mail which can then be searched with various Boolean options. reMail has only been in the application store for about six months — with a free version limited to one Gmail account and a premium version which can connect to multiple accounts. 'Google and reMail have decided to discontinue reMail's iPhone application, and we have removed it from the App Store,' writes company founder Gabor Cselle, who will be returning to Google as a Product Manager on the Gmail team. Google isn't saying what the fate of reMail might be. Some are suggesting reMail could be integrated into Gmail search or live on in some form as a part of Android, Google's mobile platform. Another possibility is that Google may have snapped up reMail just to kill it, not because reMail was a competitor to anything Google had, but because reMail made the iPhone better or the acquisition may have more to do with keeping good search technology away from the competition, as opposed to an attempt to undercut the iPhone. 'Perhaps Google is just planning to buy up all the iPhone developers, one at a time, until Android is the only game in town,' writes Bill Ray at the Register."
Sounds like a case of Google in a Microsoft's clothing.
Living With a Nerd
I downloaded the free iGmail specifically for the searching features. I use the regular iPhone mail app to read mail but it can not search in the body portion of the emails. If I need to do a search (For instance to see what I have bought through iTunes) I launch iGmail and us it's search feature. Apple really needs to think more seriously about their feature set. Full body searches is something that is very important for an email app.
Actually, this is a good case for why a developer would FOSS an application in the first place. Of course, if you're in "Please Google buy me out and make me rich beyond avarice" mode, then you wouldn't.
How about creating a semi FOSS license that remains closed source, and immediately becomes FOSS or Public Domain should the company ever fold, or the software itself becomes otherwise unavailable.
Kind of a poison pill of everlasting life. It would prevent applications from ever disappearing except by natural death (nobody wants it any longer).
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
This is well into the big double-digit count of Google headlining or top subject matter in slashdot news stories in the last 5 days, with ranging topics from broadband internet backbone building to social network privacy with Buzz to energy buy-ins, now iPhone app buy-up monopolization. Unstoppable force, friends.
I know Google has done extremely well diversifying themselves and has their fingers in anything, but no one treats them like monopolizers that Microsoft became.
Hopefully reMail turned a good profit on this... and wasn't squeezed by the big corporation.
reMail provided a capability similar to Gmail's search that worked with IMAP accounts and mail providers other than Gmail
Since part of Gmail's competitive edge is good search technology, reMail was a substantial competitive threat.
Now by buying and killing them, their search capability is no longer available on the mobile platform. iPhone users will have to use gmail and Google's built-in search instead of a third-party IMAP provider in order to get a decent search experience.
Killing this competitor protects Google's monopoly on search, and on e-mail search in particular.
No kidding. In related news, did you know that Delta bought Northwest Airlines, and now they're killing it off? Seriously. They're removing all the NWA planes, and replacing them with Delta planes. And soon you won't even be able to buy tickets on NWA, you'll have to buy them on Delta. It's more evil than Stalin and Hitler combined!
Google bought the company (one guy and his app). The value for them is in the technology, not the reMail brand. They'll include the parts they like with the gmail service. The guy who created the app got a nice chunk of change from the purchase and a job at a company many would be excited to work for. This is capitalism in it's most basic form. A guy created something of value and was rewarded for it. If this qualifies as evil, you are in the wrong country.