A gold iPhone 5s standing on a table with its home screen switched on. Photo: Ashok Govind, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
In July 2012 we covered a small tweak with a big wish behind it. Sparrow Plus made the popular Sparrow email app the default on a jailbroken iPhone, so tapping an email address anywhere in iOS opened Sparrow instead of Apple Mail. It was a simple idea that took Apple eight more years to adopt.
Sparrow: the email app everyone liked
Sparrow started as a Mac mail client and arrived on the iPhone in early 2012. It was fast, clean and built around Gmail, with gesture-based actions that felt ahead of their time. People loved it, but iOS gave third-party mail apps no way to become the system default. Every "mailto" link still opened Apple Mail.
The timing of our article was unlucky. In the same month, July 2012, Google acquired the Sparrow team, and development of the app wound down. Many of Sparrow's ideas later resurfaced in Google's own mail apps.
Defaults: a long-running complaint
For years Apple's position was that its own apps were the defaults, full stop. Jailbreak tweaks such as Sparrow Plus and Browser Changer were the only way around it. The change came with iOS 14 in 2020, when Apple allowed users to choose a default email app and a default web browser. Later releases, especially in the European Union, expanded the list of default choices further.
How to set defaults today
- Install the mail or browser app you want from the App Store.
- Open Settings, find the app or go to Settings > Apps > Default Apps on recent iOS versions.
- Choose it as the default mail app or browser.
Email security, then and now
The email app you choose matters more than it did in 2012, because your inbox is the key to resetting every other account. That includes shopping, banking and, for many people, sportsbook and casino accounts, which usually rely on email for password resets and withdrawal confirmations. Use a mail provider with two-factor authentication and keep it separate from accounts that hold money. Our betting account security checklist goes through the details.