Newton to be discontinued

Out of the blue, Rohit Nadhani (CEO of CloudMagic) shared the sad news that Newton will be shut down on September 25th:

It was a tough business decision. We explored various business models but couldn’t successfully figure out profitability & growth over the long term. It was hard; the market for premium consumer mail apps is not big enough, and it faces stiff competition from high quality free apps from Google, Microsoft, and Apple. We put up a hard and honest fight, but it was not enough to overcome the bundling & platform default advantages enjoyed by the large tech companies.

For me, this is really a blow. In March, I’ve bitten the bullet and subscribed to Newton as a no-bullshit, straight-forward, and mostly stable¹ e-mail client that delivered a significantly sized subset of my requirements towards an e-mail client.

And I liked it. It is (or soon will have been) the best e-mail client on iOS that I ever used.

I was hoping that the user base of (according to CloudMagic) 40000 subscribers was giving the developers a solid financial basis for working on the app going forward. But it’s not going to happen.

It’s sad to see this app disappear.