• by Jess Nelson , March 30, 2017

App maker Readdle has hired an Apple Mail veteran to spearhead the development of its mobile email application, Spark.

Terry Blanchard served as an engineering manager for Apple Mail for the last six years, but now he is branching out and building his own email development team for Readdle. As Readdle is based in Ukraine, Blanchard will be opening the company’s second office in Silicon Valley to attract engineering talent and potential funding.

Readdle has been a bootstrapped startup since it was originally founded a decade ago.

Readdle has developed a wide consortium of iOS and macOS applications focused on productivity. The company’s product portfolio includes PDF Expert, Calendars 5 and Scanner Pro, but the app maker is perhaps most well known for its mobile email application, Spark.

Spark is a free mobile email application now available on the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and Mac computers. First launched in the summer of 2015, Spark positions itself as an intelligent inbox management service that prioritizes important emails with a smart inbox feature.

Spark users can choose to view their emails in chronological order or organized by category. Spark’s smart inbox feature highlights the most important emails by automatically categorizing incoming mail by group, similar to Gmail’s categories feature. For example, all marketing promotions might be listed under the “newsletters” category.

Spark users can also customize their inbox to suit their own individual needs, creating smart folders of their own and personalizing email notifications to be alerted when an important email has arrived.

Additional product features include quick reply suggestions, snooze-able emails, and email signature identification. Users can have multiple email signatures, and Spark will recommend the most appropriate signature while an email is being drafted.

Spark is also platform-agnostic, meaning that it works with any email provider and can streamline emails from multiple accounts into one unified inbox. Available integrations in the mobile app currently include Dropbox, Box, iCloud Drive and Evernote, and Spark’s macOS application is compatible with MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar feature.

Now that Blanchard is on board, one of the first planned expansions is to launch Spark on Android devices, but a definitive launch date is not known at this time.

Readdle also intends to add calendar support for Spark, as well as to design a new chat feature to replace the traditional forward button. This Slack-like chat service will eventually be available to businesses through a subscription offer, the manner in which Readdle plans to eventually monetize Spark.