Amazon’s cloud storage service, Amazon Drive will be shutting down on December 31, 2023. The Android and iOS apps will be taken down by October 31 and no new uploads will be allowed after January 31, 2023.
The company claims it’ll provide enough time for customers to save their files and save them from being deleted permanently. The Amazon Drive website and apps won’t be functional after December 31, 2023, but photos and videos will be accessible using Amazon Photos. Amazon has also provided instructions for customers to download and save their files locally or with another service in an FAQ published about the new announcement.
Amazon has also given steps to download larger or more files if the size limitations are restraining some customers from downloading their files. The process requires going through the Amazon Photos desktop app in order to download more than 5GB or 1000 files at a time.
The service launched back in March 2011. and gave customers 5GB of free space with the Android, iOS or web apps. Amazon Drive was the company’s main competitor to other common cloud storage services like Google Drive and Microsoft’s OneDrive. That said, Amazon’s Apple or Google Photos competitor, Amazon Photos will remain functional.
The Amazon Drive depreciation is happening as the company shifts its focus to the photo management app. Any photos or videos users have uploaded to Amazon Drive will continue to remain available in Amazon Photos.
It is rather unprecedented for a company to shut down a cloud storage service, especially one of the scale and size of Amazon, even if it doesn’t have as many customers. However, Amazon seems to be putting its focus where they feel it can compete better with its rivals who have already run away with the cloud storage business.
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