Essential is bringing back Newton Mail, the defunct email app that it acquired last December following Newton’s shutdown in September due to an inability to compete with better funded and more popular competitors like Google and Microsoft, via Android Police.

As it was before the shutdown, Newton Mail is once again available for Newton Mail iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows devices, making it one of the only truly cross-platform dedicated email apps around. Essential’s is keeping the price the same too: $49.99 per year (with a 14 day free trial to see if you’d actually like to pay for it.) And despite the fact that Essential now owns the company, there don’t seem to be any special discounts for customers that own Essential Phones.

That Essential would bring back Newton is somewhat surprising

That Essential would bring back Newton is somewhat surprising, given that CloudMagic — Newton’s developer — had originally shut down the app before being acquired due what founder Rohit Nadhani described as inability to “successfully figure out profitability & growth over the long term.”

Given that the same challenges still face Newton today — Gmail and Outlook are still free alternatives with all the funding that Google and Microsoft can afford to throw at them — it’s curious that Essential (which itself has been struggling lately with staff layoffs and a distinct lack of a new phone since the original model in 2017) would invest the time and money in not only buying a defunct email app that couldn’t turn a profit, but bring it back virtually unchanged into the same market it originally failed in.

Still, Newton was (and is) a great email app option, and with things like the upcoming shutdown of Google Inbox and the relative drought of good third party email apps out there, it’s good to see that there’s some competition in the field again. Hopefully, with Essential’s backing, Newton will be able to succeed where it once failed.