Upon hearing of the news of the Sparrow acquisition, the first thought in my head was the end of a wonderful project — which meant my journey for an email app continued.

Hours later, the next thought dawned on me. I had recently praised the Sparrow app to a friend of mine so effectively that he bought it from the Mac App Store.

20 days ago.

I immediately felt bad. Although there wasn't a way for me to know, I basically just convinced my friend to spend $9.99 on an app that would be dead in the water.

At first I apologized — then I saw people on Twitter talking about receiving a refund from Apple¹. I didn't know what Apple's return policy was, but I was pretty sure an app purchase of less than a month ago would qualify for a refund — if at all.

So I got in contact with my buddy and went to the Mac App Store support page to file a ticket. I selected Contact Support > Get Started > Puchases, Billing & Redemption > The Topic is not listed in which I entered "Sparrow Refund". After clicking on continue, I ended up at a form that required basic information. However, one of the fields was for the Order number: — a simple search for the iTunes receipt in his email gave us the number we needed.

He then wrote up a summary of the situation — explaining his discontent of the end of life email that was sent out by the developer (amongst other colorful commentary). Afterwards he submitted the request and we just hoped for the best.

Good news.

A few hours later, my buddy informed me that he was getting a full refund of the app in which it would be credited back to his card within 5-7 business days.

While I don't know Apple's policy for return for apps, my buddy was fortunate enough to get a refund. If you purchased Sparrow recently, either for iOS or OS X, give it a try. The worst they'll say is no. If not that, the next worst thing they can say is they'll give you App Store credit — in which you can hopefully invest it on another app. An app in which the developers will continue to improve and update their app in the spirit of independent 3rd party developers.

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