• by Ray Schultz , May 14, 2020

Newton, an email management app that was to be closed down on April 30 by its owner Essential,  has been acquired and relaunched jointly by Simform and SoFriendly.

Newton users can return to their original accounts, and will be offered an additional three-month subscription for free and a 20% discount for returning subscription.

"There are many bugs and crashes we need to iron out,” states Maitrik Kataria, CEO of Newton and partner at Simform. “We also need to deep dive into the codebase in order to understand over a million lines of code.” 

The new owners hope to offer requested features such as “dark mode and fixing Superchargers” within three to six months, Kataria says.

The Newton app had 40,000 paid subscribers at its peak in 2018, but was shut down by owner CloudMagic because of a seeming lack of long-term growth and profitability.

“It was a tough business decision” wrote Rohit Nadhani, founder and CEO CloudMagic, at the time. “We explored various business models but couldn’t successfully figure out profitability & growth over the long term.”

Nadhani noted that “the market for premium consumer mail apps is not big enough, and (Newton) faces stiff competition from high quality free apps from Google, Microsoft, and Apple.”

Essential, Newton’s next owner, announced in February of this year that it would shutter the app. 

Newton offers such features like Read receipts, Send later, Undo send, Recap, and Instant push notifications. But it was criticized by users for poor customer support, app upgrades and bug fixtures. 

"We want to address these concerns head on by introducing pro-grade customer support,” states Justin Mitchell, co-owner of Newton. ”The Newton community needs more engagement and love."