# Email vs Apps markdown=yes This is another example of how the predicted death of email back in 2005 may have been a bit premature. Actually, in 2015-2016, I've seen stories about how email is dead, despite email's usefulness as a notification tool, and the growing popularity of email newsletters that have existed for many years. > “We tried to make a news app,” [Calacanis] explains. “It would be the Uber or Twitter of news ... Everyone agreed with that premise. There was a whole cohort [of startups] that were invested in to do that ... And they have all failed pretty hard.” > Calacanis ascribes this failure to two thing: **app-building is expensive from a technical perspective,** and getting a news app into people’s daily workflows is extremely hard. > “Half a million people downloaded the app, and about half gave their email," he recounts. "Only one percent of them used the app every day.” > So Calacanis started an experiment. His team would email the top 10 stories of the day to the email addresses they had gotten. They saw 40% usage versus less than 1% on the app. “40x the return,” he says. “And it cost 90% less. We didn’t need any of the developers.” hr.