What you need to know about the sunset of consumer Google+ on April 2

Editor’s note: On February 28, 2019, we updated the ‘For developers’ section with new information about the Google+ APIs

We announced this past fall that we’re sunsetting consumer Google+ in April 2019, and today have more details to share. While this process of deleting consumer content will take a few months and some content may remain visible during this time, you should take action before April to ensure you don’t lose any content you want to save.

Many different people use Google+, from everyday consumer users to developers to teams in business settings. Because of this, we want to provide the details you need to navigate this change. Below is more information and recommended actions.

For Google+ consumer users

Starting April 2, 2019, we will shut down your Google+ account and any pages you created, and we'll begin deleting content from consumer Google+ accounts. Photos and videos from Google+ in your Album Archive and your Google+ pages will also be deleted. If you have Google+ content that you would like to save, you must do so before April 2nd.

To get started, please reference these Google+ account download instructions, which explain how to download and save your content. Check out this article on our Help Center or this list of frequently asked questions if you’re looking for more information.

For G Suite users and admins

While we bring consumer Google+ to a close, we are continuing our investment in Google+ for the enterprise. You can read more details in this blog post. This means that for those of you who use Google+ as part of G Suite, your accounts will remain active. G Suite users include businesses who pay for its services and educational institutions and other organizations that use G Suite at no cost.

If you’re not sure if your organization uses G Suite, you can check here. If you’re a G Suite admin, you can get more details about the specific impacts of the consumer Google+ shutdown on the G Suite experience in our Help Center.

For developers who use Google+ APIs

Lastly, we are shutting down all legacy Google+ APIs. We recommend that developers migrate to alternative APIs such as Google Sign-in and Google People API. However, for cases where developers are unable to move over before March 7th, we have created a new implementation of some Google+ APIs critical to sign-in only. The new implementation will only return basic fields necessary for sign-in functionality such as name and email address, if authorized by the user. More details here.

We’d like to take this opportunity to thank all of our Google+ users who’ve built their communities with us over the years. We appreciate what you’ve created and your contributions. Look out for more enterprise-specific Google+ details later this year.