What happens when the app you rely on shuts down?
Services close, hardware is switched off remotely and terms change without warning. What the record shows, and why software you run has no end date.
Everyone knows, vaguely, that online services do not last forever. What most people underestimate is how routine it is, and how little say you get.
What the record actually shows
Google keeps getting used as the example, partly because somebody has been keeping count. The Killed by Google graveyard lists 307 discontinued products: 68 apps, 215 services and 24 hardware products.
Some were things almost nobody used. Others were not:
- Google Reader — 2005 to 2013. Millions of people organised their reading through it. It was closed while still popular.
- Google+ — 2011 to 2019.
- Stadia — 2019 to 2023. A games service, closed roughly three years in, after people had bought games on it.
- Google Podcasts — 2018 to 2024.
- Google Domains — 2014 to 2023. Domain names, sold to another company.
This is not a criticism of one firm — Google is simply the best documented, and being large is exactly why it can afford to close things. Every company does this. Most do it quieter.
a service somebody else runs
You come to rely on it
Often for years, and often for something irreplaceable.
The announcement arrives
On a date chosen by people whose plans you were never told about.
A window to export
Then it is switched off, and what you did not save is gone.
open software you run yourself
You come to rely on it
On a machine you control, with the files already yours.
The project may slow or stop
This genuinely happens. Projects get abandoned all the time.
Your copy keeps running
Nothing switches off on a date you did not choose, and the code stays public for somebody else to pick up.
It is not only services
Hardware can be switched off remotely too. In 2016, Google-owned Nest shut down the servers behind the Revolv smart home hub — a device people had bought outright, for around three hundred dollars, which had been sold with a “lifetime subscription”. Turning off the service turned the hardware into a brick. Nest eventually offered compensation after a public backlash.
More recently, Spotify discontinued its Car Thing dashboard device and announced it would stop working entirely in December 2024. The company initially declined to offer refunds, then reversed course amid customer anger and a lawsuit.
The pattern is the same in both: the thing you bought kept working only while somebody else chose to keep a server running.
And the rules can change under you
Closure is the dramatic version. The quieter one is a terms update.
In June 2024, Adobe rewrote its terms of use in language that many customers read as claiming broad rights over the work they had made in its software. The uproar was substantial enough that Adobe published clarifications and then rewrote the terms again to be more explicit about what it would and would not do.
Whether the original wording truly meant what people feared is genuinely arguable. What is not arguable is the underlying position: the terms governing your work could be rewritten, and the first you knew about it was an email.
What “you own it” is actually worth
When you run open-source software on hardware you control, the arrangement is different in a specific and limited way. It is worth being precise, because this gets overclaimed.
Nothing switches off on somebody else’s schedule. The version you have keeps running. There is no shutdown date because there is no company with the ability to set one.
The rules cannot be rewritten. Open-source licences do not get revised underneath you. The terms you accepted are the terms you keep.
The files are already yours. They are on your disk, in ordinary formats. There is no export process to complete before a deadline, because there is no deadline.
If the project stops, you are not evicted. This is the honest version of “open source lasts forever” — projects absolutely do get abandoned, and it happens often. The difference is what abandonment means. A closed service being abandoned means it disappears. An open project being abandoned means development stops and your copy carries on working, with the code still public for somebody else to pick up. Several of the most widely used self-hosted tools today exist because exactly that happened.
What it does not protect you from
Being straight about the limits:
Software rots. An abandoned project eventually stops working with new operating systems, browsers or phones. Running forever is not the same as running well.
Security fixes stop. This is the real risk. Software nobody maintains stops getting flaws fixed, and that matters a great deal for anything reachable from outside.
You are the migration plan. When something does eventually need replacing, nobody sends you a helpful email.
Your hardware fails. Which is a backup problem, and it is the most likely way to lose your things by a wide margin.
The practical version
None of this means abandoning services other people run. It means noticing which things you would genuinely mind losing, and treating those differently.
For anything you would mind losing:
- Ask what the export looks like before you need it. If there is no easy way to get everything out in a standard format, that is the answer to how much they expect you to leave.
- Keep your own copy of anything irreplaceable. Photos especially. A service holding the only copy of something is not storage, it is a hope.
- Prefer standard formats. A photo is a photo anywhere. A note in somebody’s proprietary format is a note in their app.
- For the things that matter most, consider running them yourself — not because it is easier, but because nobody else can set the end date.
For everything else, use whatever is convenient and enjoy it. Most things do not need this treatment, and pretending otherwise is exhausting.
The question is not “will this shut down”. Given enough time, most things do. The question is: when it does, what happens to my stuff?
Ask that at the start, and the shutdown notice is a mild inconvenience rather than the moment you find out.