Microsoft finally kills Sunrise, brings more features to Outlook

It's time to finally pour one out for Sunrise, the calendar app that Microsoft has had on death watch since May. The app will stop updating calendar changes today, and it'll log users out tomorrow, the Sunrise team announced this morning. Sunrise was originally scheduled to be shut down on August 31, but Microsoft chose to delay its execution for a few weeks so that it could bring more of Sunrise's features over to its Outlook mobile apps. At the very least, Microsoft held to its word.

Outlook on the iPhone and Android will support Sunrise's event icons starting today, which make it easy for you to glance at the type of appointments you've scheduled. As a bonus for Sunrise users, Microsoft has added even more event icons than the app has had before. You'll also have access to Sunrise's "Interesting Calendars," which lets you subscribe to a variety of shared calendars for things like sports events. That comes on top of the ability to tie into calendars from other apps, which was added back in April.

Additionally, Sunrise's appointment date and time picker is making its way to Outlook as well, though it's only on iOS for now (it's coming to Android eventually). The latter feature doesn't sound too exciting, but I've always found it more intuitive than other calendar apps. Among other updates, the Outlook apps will soon have built-in maps to display your meeting locations, recurring meeting editing and the ability to schedule Skype for Business meetings.

The Sunrise team was largely responsible for redesigning the Outlook apps last year, and Microsoft hasn't been shy about saying how much it wants to integrate Sunrise's best features. As someone who's depended on Sunrise for years, I'm sad to see it go. But at least it's found a new home inside of one of the best email apps on the market.