Google on Wednesday acquired reMail, a popular iPhone application that performed super fast full-text searches of Gmail and IMAP e-mail accounts. Apparently, Google's first order of business after buying the app was to remove it from Apple's App store.
Terms of the deal were not released. But we do know that reMail's founder, Gabor Cselle, will be heading back to the Googleplex in Mountain View, California where he'll join the Gmail team as a product manager. Cselle had once upon a time worked at Google once, as an engineering intern on Gmail, reports Macworld.
Cselle has a long history of searching e-mail, he was also the vice president of engineering at Xobni, the popular full-text search tool for Microsoft Outlook.
The future of the app is up in the air, though its disappearance from the app store has caused rumors to fly. Cselle says on his blog that support for reMail will continue through the end of March, and the once premium features will now be free and available to all users. These include support for IMAP and Rackspace accounts.
According to PC World, the speculation is split between two fronts. Some say reMail will be integrated into Gmail and eventually become an Android app. Others say that Google will just kill it, because it made the iPhone easier to use.
I find the latter argument to be fairly childish. With all the app developers out there, nothing would stop one of them from seizing the opportunity for writing a replacement for reMail. Google likely isn't planning on acquiring every app out there that iPhone users love.
Please visit the Google Subnet home page for more news, blogs and podcasts. Sign up for the weekly Google newsletter. (Click on News/Google News Alert.) More blog posts from Google Subnet:
Subscribe to all Google Subnet bloggers or Follow Google Subnet on Twitter Julie Bort on Twitter.
- The 10 Coolest Experiments from Google Labs
- Google Voice to storm the enterprise in 2010
- Live Android tops list of 10 best open source apps
- Ask Not What Google Can Do For Developers...
- Email Automation, Can it!
- Google joins IPSO Alliance to help consumers be green citizens
- 10 great Google Chrome extensions worth downloading
Follow