Microsoft’s Sunrise team helps improve new iOS and Android Outlook apps

The company has also said that the Sunrise app will eventually be discontinued until its features are fully integrated into Outlook.

But Sunrise is a richer calendaring tool – it includes social features like “Meet”, a way to schedule meetings from other messaging apps; integration with favorite apps like Facebook, TripIt, Wunderlist, Evernote, Asana, and others; integrated weather forecasts and directions; as well as the ability to access third-party calendars like those for sports teams and TV shows.

Microsoft’s acquisitions in the email and calendar space appear to be paying off. The company announced Wednesday that its Outlook app, built on technology from recently acquired email startup Acompli, has reached 30 million users since launching in January on Android and iOS. If you want the freshly redesigned Outlook for iOS app then it’s available immediately in the App Store, and the Android equivalent will be arriving soon.

Sunrise is easily our favourite cross-platform calendar app, and we all took a big gulp when it was purchased by Microsoft past year as we waited to see what would happen.

Eventually, Sunrise will disappear completely once Outlook becomes more feature complete, and Sunrise’s team will be working under a single Outlook Mobile team in the future. The Outlook team also improved navigation around the app, allowing users to do more with fewer taps, the blog post says.

The influence of the Sunrise team on Outlook is already clear – the news of Sunrise’s imminent demise was delivered alongside a refresh of Outlook’s iOS and Android apps, including updated in-app calendars. Calendar event details have been tweaked to provide more information, and overall the app just looks a lot better. As you know, I’m one of them: I use and recommend Outlook Mobile on both Android and iOS (and on Windows phones as well, of course). The updates are rolling out to iOS today and should arrive on Android early next month.

Android users will find that the app fits better with the overall system design and material design principles that are common across Android apps. That’s the sort of news that Sunrise fans were probably dreading following Microsoft’s acquisition of the app, but Soltero says Microsoft won’t sunset Sunrise (hah) until all of its key features are in Outlook. Additionally, around 20 percent of those people have more than one account linked to Outlook, which is a sign that they may be relying on it for both work and personal email. “You will also see improvements to Outlook’s ability to create meetings while on the go and handle meetings across time zones”. On the email side of things, event invites are highlighted in your inbox, and you can even RSVP to them without opening up the message.