Slack Acquires Astro

I used to be very bitter about acquihires, and startups planning for exits from day one. But maybe - maybe just to retain sanity - it&#x27;s time to look at things differently. Maybe SaaS startups should not be treated as actual products, but just as mere <i>temporary experiments</i>. If the company fails, the product dies. If the company succeeds, the products gets killed. But, however briefly, we get to see some concept implemented in software, adding to the list of things that could be done (but usually aren&#x27;t).

A two-week shutdown notice is <i>unbelievably</i> short. And given the way the Screenhero acquisition went, I wouldn&#x27;t be too optimistic if I were an Astro user.<p>Screenhero was acquired by Slack, and while it wasn&#x27;t shut down immediately, new signups were disabled. They eventually shut it down entirely when they released support for screensharing within Slack, but the experience of that is nothing like what it was with Screenhero. Even aside from forcing people to pay for a Slack instance just to screenshare[0], the actual video sharing experience just... doesn&#x27;t work anywhere near as well. So the pattern seems to be:<p>- acquire product - shut standalone product down - replace product with inferior version of product, integrated into Slack - charge more<p>[0] if you don&#x27;t already share a Slack instance with the person you want to call, this is a <i>really</i> awkward workflow just to screenshare

It&#x27;s almost at a point where we could do with a cloud-to-butt-esque plugin that replaces &quot;acquires&quot; with &quot;shuts down&quot;<p>&gt; The past few years have been a remarkable journey at Astro<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com&#x2F;</a>

&gt; For more details about what’s next for Astro customers, read Astro’s announcement on their website.<p>What&#x27;s next? Scrambling to find a replacement email workflow in t minus 15 days and counting ...<p>There is NO &quot;what&#x27;s next&quot;. The product they are using is disappearing forever. Why are these product shutterings always phrased as a &quot;bold new adventure&quot; for former customers?<p>&gt; We’d like to thank you, our users, for whom we built this company, and for whom we look forward to serving further as part of Slack.<p>I realize it is exciting news for the Astro VCs (maybe?) and, again, maybe Astro&#x27;s employees, but this isn&#x27;t how you thank someone for being a loyal customer. Apologize for screwing them at least.

Seems like the standard end for any half-way decent mail app: acquihire and shut down.<p>Still sore about Google shuttering Sparrow a few years ago - it was by far the best email client on both iOS and Mac at the time.

With Google Inbox getting shut down, a lot of people jumped ship to astro.<p>Just kind of funny.<p>I&#x27;m sure a fair amount of people are pulling their hair out

I just went to Astro&#x27;s site to see what they do and why this makes a difference for me... but all I can see is their acquisition announcement and I am not any closer to understanding what it is they do for Email :&#x2F;

&gt;On Wednesday October 10, we’ll shut down our Astro apps for Mac, iOS, Android, Amazon Alexa, and Slack.<p>Isn&#x27;t this very little time if your company depends on Astro for work?

This is very disappointing.<p>1 - Slack has a terrible Electron app. I&#x27;d like to see money spent fixing that over buying more talent for some odd integration between my email and my work chat. 2 - Astro was great, it met all my needs&#x2F;wants in an email client.<p>Point 2 is really the gotcha here. Astro snoozes, allows using the gmail keyboard shortcuts, supports maOS and iOS, and most importantly, implements the Office365 api directly. (As opposed to the typical Exchange and&#x2F;or IMAP tunnels most clients use.)<p>The company I work for either through mandate, or just letting IT do stuff (I don&#x27;t know which), has disabled IMAP access AND Exchange access to our Office365 Instance. BUT I can use the api.<p>Astro and Polymail both fit the bill.<p>I liked Astro better. I immediately thought about going to Polymail, but they have gone subscription. (I don&#x27;t have a problem paying for an email client, but once should be enough, thanks you.)

I am going to stick to the ecosystem (Apple, Google or Microsoft) from now-onwards. Too many email apps tried - Sparrow, Mailbox, Newton, Inbox and now this. I have come to realize that the Mail app on Mac or Gmail just works. I can do without all those fancy features that were built into these apps.

This is so frustrating, as I really loved the client, and now it&#x27;s just being killed off. It&#x27;s absolutely burning a good chunk of whatever goodwill I may have had for Slack.

I really liked Astro. Can anyone recommend an email client for macOS and iOS that has scheduled sending and read receipts?

Slack, just fix the performance of desktop first.

Sigh.

Everyone&#x27;s moaning about &quot;aquihire and shut down&quot; but it would make ZERO sense for Slack to do that in this case. Astro was in no way a competitor to Slack. Seems to me like they&#x27;re going after Gmail for Business.<p>Edit: Apparently they did shut it down...