Sparrow, the electronic mail client for Apple Macintosh and iOS devices, died on the 20th of July 2012, upon its acquisition by Google. It was one year in general release. Designed by Dominique Leca and his colleagues at Sparrow SAS in Paris, it had achieved in short order what no rival had managed in a decade: an email experience that felt native to the machines on which it ran, and native, too, to the habits of the people who used them. It was small, considered, and quietly radical.

Google acquired the team for their talent and discontinued the product for everyone else. No successor was delivered. The application remained available for download, receiving no further updates, until time and operating system changes rendered it inert. It was thirty-seven versions old.