Mailbox for iOS arrived a little over a month ago with a somewhat ambitious goal of making a better GMail app that Google. The company was surprisingly able to achieve this is the eyes of its users, with the app being in high demand, as it is being only offered through a reservation system.
Now Dropbox has announced that they have purchased Mailbox.
Dropbox will be acquiring both the product and the 13 employees of Mailbox, who will be joining the Dropbox team. Reports suggest that Dropbox could have paid as much as $100 million on this acquisition. The reports also suggest that both Yahoo and Facebook had been interested in purchasing the company, which could be the likely cause of a bidding war which resulted in the final price.
Dropbox plans to keep Mailbox running as an independent app with a goal of eventually sharing their services. For example we will have features like mail attachments being stored on Dropbox.
There is hope that with Dropbox’s acquisition of Mailbox, that we would see faster app updates and a release of an Android version of the app. However there is no news or specifics on the matter at this point.
source – Mailbox (Twitter) | GigaOM | TechCrunch