By: Guy Suter (read original post here: https://blog.trove.com/retiring-the-trove-mail-app-a0a7612bbbb7)
Well folks… the time has finally come. We are announcing the Trove Mail app’s retirement today. The app’s official last day will be September 17th. After that, its artificial intelligence will be moving from helping people clean up their inboxes and highlighting missed questions, to a new networking app that helps the right people meet one another at the right time.
Over the years, the Trove Mail app attracted a small (relatively speaking) but enthusiastic user-base. Thank you to our users! Your encouragement has meant the world to us. Our team is devoted to creating AI-based solutions that make a real impact in people’s everyday lives. You gave us that opportunity. You propelled Trove Mail’s success so much that Apple featured it as an app they love. We can’t thank you enough.
To say this was a tough decision would be an understatement. We love Trove Mail. I’ve never found anything better for keeping my inbox cleaned up. There is simply no substitute for Trove Mail’s intelligent multi-swipe.
However, over the past year, we’ve shifted our focus as a business. We’ve been exploring ways to apply our AI not just to email, but to the wider world of human communication. During this transition, we entertained all kinds of approaches for keeping Trove Mail alive. Unfortunately, each option diverts attention from Trove’s main focus — connecting people by putting your entire, always-up-to-date, relationship network at your fingertips.
So how did we go from an email app to a networking app? Here’s the thought process. Shortly after releasing the first version of Trove Mail, we recognized that our AI’s ability to accurately understand relationships between people was its most powerful capability. How we communicate with people tells a rich story about how we are connected to one another. Unfortunately, this context is buried in decades-old datasets and is impossible to interpret manually.
We began by including these relationship insights into the Trove Mail app itself. Ultimately, we realized that bringing this powerful technology to the masses requires Trove to be an app focused entirely on your connections. An early version of our new Trove app is available now. There is no other place you can go to build a more accurate map of everyone you know and safely connect your network of relationships with people you trust.
We are excited to share more news about Trove’s new app for connecting people with you soon, but this story is about Trove Mail…
Honestly, it’s a tough reality for email apps. Despite the fact that email is such a big part of our daily lives, there is strikingly little incentive for innovation. I hope we see that cycle break soon. Email deserves to be more than a string of end-of-life apps and Google’s token AI experiments.
Our team had a blast exploring the possibilities to use AI to make email better. We imagined an email app that was prescient about its user’s goals. It highlighted things that are truly important. It understood when you would want to be interrupted. We even built a conversational email experience with eyebrow-raising features.
People used Trove Mail’s multi-swipe to archive 10s of millions of messages. In other words, the Trove Mail app did the work of a person manually archiving an email message, every second of every day, for a full year. I think it’s time for a well-deserved retirement!
https://blog.trove.com/retiring-the-trove-mail-app-a0a7612bbbb7
