Amazon Drive, also called Amazon Storage service is set to shutdown in 17 months time. Starting from July 2022 to 31st December 2023. The storage service that Amazon launched in March 2011 didn’t seem to go as planned.
In 2014, Amazon rolled out a third party API for developers. This API helped developers to integrate the Amazon Drive into their apps for storing of app date, game settings and preferences.
In 2015, Amazon introduced the Amazon Drive unlimited subscription plan. But for some reasons, it was canceled two years later. Amazon prime members and owners of Amazon Fire tablets were the only ones that could enjoy the unlimited storage. Without having any of these, your storage was limited to 5GB only. Even with the 5GB limited storage, you could not use it in storing photos.
The announcement was made via email messages sent to Amazon Storage users. According to the content of the email, Amazon claims they are shutting down the file storage service in order to focus more on Amazon photos.
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When Is Amazon Drive Shutting Down
Users of the Amazon Drive service have up to 1st January 2024 to store or download their files from the Amazon Storage. When the set date is up, photos and videos will be move by Amazon to Amazon photos. Also, you can no longer upload files to Amazon Drive ones the set date is up.
As a subscriber, now is the best time to cancel your Amazon Drive subscription for a potential refund. Cancelation can be done on the web or via the Android or iOS Apps respectively. Those who may cancel their subscriptions using these apps may do so before October 31st when they will remove the apps from the Google Play Store and Apple App Store respectively.
Why Shutting Down Amazon Drive
It looks the competition was too tough for Amazon Drive to pave its way through. Amazon is a solid and a very popular brand, no doubt. But in certain cases, how big your brand is cannot save you in some chosen areas. For example, as big as Microsoft is, Windows Mobile failed miserably. We can attribute the same scenario to Amazon Drive’s untimely demise. There are already competitors out there offering cheaper cloud storages including Dropbox, Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive.
The popularity of these big names were just too much for Amazon Drive to catch up. And besides, Amazon were not offering anything better than what others are already offering out there. According to data collected by Statista, Google drive is the most popular cloud storage, followed iCloud and then OneDrive.
