Google planned to permanently shut down the consumer version of its social network Google+ on March 7, 2019. Due to major security issues that could have allowed malicious developers to gather users’ data.
“As part of the sunset of Google+ for consumers, we will be shutting down Google+ APIs on March 7, 2019. This will be a progressive shutdown beginning in late January. So we are advising all developers reliant on the Google+ APIs that calls to those APIs may start to intermittently fail as early as January 28, 2019.”-Google
Further, it added “On or around December 20, 2018, affected developers should also receive an email listing recently used Google+ API methods in their projects. Whether or not an email is received, we strongly encourage developers to search for and remove any dependencies on Google+ APIs from their applications.”
All the web, mobile app integrations, plugins, will also stop working on that date.
Formally, it was decided to shut down Google+ in August 2019 but earlier in last month another security issue occurs that impacted around 52.2 million users.
Google+ will continue to work in the enterprise version as part of G Suite.
The most commonly used APIs that are being shut down include:
- REST API
- Google+ Web API
- Google+ Android SDK
- Domains API
- Google+ Pages API
