HTC appears to have retired its Mail app, despite 10 million installs
HTC Mail, the Taiwanese company's modified version of the stock Android client for email, has mysteriously disappeared from the Google Play Store. The app, which has been installed more than 10 million times, is still being pre-loaded onto HTC's latest smartphones such as the U12+.
Support and updates for HTC Mail from now on appear to have been abandoned. According to our friends at Android Police, who dived into a cached version of the Play Store, HTC Mail was last updated in December 2018. It had a star rating of 3.1 and plenty of reviews citing problems with logging in and sending emails.
HTC Mail was able to pull together all of your email accounts, be them Gmail, Yahoo Mail or Outlook, into one place by using the IMAP or POP3 platforms. Google's own Gmail app, which comes pre-installed on all smartphones running Android, has featured support for non-Google email accounts for years.
It is still not 100% clear why HTC has called time on its own Mail app. We'll let you know if the manufacturer releases a statement to justify the app's removal from the Play Store.
The slow and painful death of HTC phones
The last twelve to eighteen months have not been kind to HTC. At the end of last year, the company published reports that year-on-year revenues were down by more than 70%. The manufacturer did release two phones in the second half of 2018, the U12+ and the U12 Life, and both were sort of fine, but nobody buys HTC phones these days, clearly.
There was also the Exodus, the brand's blockchain phone that could only be bought with cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin - which has suffered a spectacular downfall of its own. The Exodus represented a kind of desperate last throw of the dice for HTC, and it didn't pay off. Just this week, HTC announced that it would start selling the Exodus for real cash in March. The Exodus 1 will cost $699 in the US. All the best, lads.
It is better news for HTC in terms of non-smartphone products, however. At the MWC 2019 in Barcelona this week, the manufacturer announced new gamer-friendly controllers for its Vive Cosmos VR headset. Following on from what the brand unveiled at CES 2019 too, virtual reality looks like HTC's best chance of staying relevant in 2019.
Do you use the HTC Mail app? Let us know in the comments below.
Source: Android Police
