Sparrow for the iPhone: Get Ready To Pay For Push Notifications (by @jkhowland)

Sparrow is trying to be clever, giving the tech world good news and bad news as close together as possbile.

Sparrow for the Mac

Good News (kinda): For you stuck in the 90s using POP, Sparrow for Mac now supports the archaic delivery method.

The app added a long list of new features:
- POP support
- Unified inbox, starred, sent, drafts, trash
- Esc on Quick Reply saves a message as a draft
- Empty spam button
- Inbox Zero message when your inbox is clean
- Composer: “sender” field no accessible with Tab key
- Pull-to-refresh for starred, unread, priority messages
- Shift-Command-Option-M toggles extended sidebar
- App startup time improvement

The real good news for me was the unified starred, sent, drafts and trash. The iPhone Mail app fails to do that, and I’m hoping Sparrow moves this over to their iPhone app soon. Speaking of Sparrow for iOS…

Sparrow for the iPhone

Bad News: Push Notifications in Sparrow for iPhone will require a subscription.

In an upcoming version of the app, Sparrow developers say they’ll be charging a yearly subscription for push notifications.

The downside is that the developer says it’s been unsuccessful in petitioning Apple to get the VoIP privilege necessary to integrate push notifications into the app the way it wanted to.

The new version of the app has a few great new features. Personally, I think a very low priced subscription seems reasonable. If the user is constantly costing them money beyond the initial payment they made for the app, they need a way to recoop costs. But I think this news is a bit overwhelming for most users.

The app is now also available in nine total languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Dutch, Russian, and Chinese.

Image Source: Sparrow