Amazon’s consumer-focused storage service, Amazon Drive, will wind down over the subsequent yr, Amazon introduced at this time. In an e mail to customers, the corporate mentioned that it was taking the chance to “extra absolutely focus” its efforts on Amazon Photographs, Amazon’s reply to iCloud Photographs and Google Photographs.
Amazon Drive prospects have till December 31, 2023 to save lots of their saved information; as of January 1, 2023, file importing will stop to work. Photographs and movies might be transferred to Amazon Photographs robotically, however different file varieties have to be downloaded manually from the Amazon Drive internet dashboard.
Customers who at the moment subscribe to paid Amazon Drive plans can cancel their subscriptions now for a possible refund. Cancellation could be executed on the net or via the Android and iOS apps — not less than earlier than the apps are faraway from the Google Play and App Retailer, respectively, on October 31.
Amazon launched Amazon Drive as Amazon Cloud Drive in 2011, initially providing pay-as-you-need tiered storage plans each for Amazon Prime and non-Prime customers. November 2014 noticed the rollout of an API that allowed third-party builders to combine Amazon Drive into their very own apps to save lots of issues like recreation settings, preferences, and different app state information within the cloud.
Limitless plans for Amazon Drive had been launched in 2015, after which discontinued two years later. Storage turned restricted to 5GB for non-photo uploads a short while afterward. Amazon Prime members and Hearth Pill homeowners, nevertheless. retained free limitless picture storage.
Competitors was probably a think about Amazon Drive’s demise. In any case, numerous suppliers provide low-cost cloud file storage nowadays, together with Google Drive, Dropbox, Field, and OneDrive. Amazon Drive’s pricing wasn’t even significantly aggressive — the service charged $119 a yr for 2TB, the going fee for a similar quantity of storage at Dropbox and Google Drive.
According to Statista, Google Drive was the most well-liked cloud storage service as of September 2021, adopted by iCloud and OneDrive.
