Google’s latest service to be killed off has reached EOL
Google giveth, and Google taketh away. Sometimes, though, it feels like we get a whole lot more of the “taketh” than the alternative, and you never have to wait too long to hear about the next product or service Google has decided to put out to pasture. A few months back, we got word that Google was getting ready to turn off the lights on Grasshopper, an app built to teach new coders how to get started — and today, that day finally arrives.
The initial communication about the Grasshopper shutdown got a little mangled, with a “please ignore” test post message in its support forums, before finally being updated to communicate Google’s intent to shutter the service on June 15. At the time, we learned that the web app would be going dark, and you wouldn’t be able to log in to the Grasshopper app on phones — although users presently logged in will still be able to access it for the time being.
With June 15 upon us, we’re already seeing parts of Grasshopper going dark. While the primary Grasshopper site is still live on the web, the support forums where we got the details of the shutdown are already offline. And Google has already removed the Grasshopper app from the Play Store — if you still need access, for whatever reason, there’s always APKMirror.
Mostly, though, this feels like a very low-key dialing-down of an effort that wasn’t hugely popular in the first place. The Grasshopper social account on Twitter had been dormant for years, and today’s shutdown arrives without acknowledgment.
Compared to massive failures like Stadia, this loss stings a whole lot less, but we’re sure that at least some of you were fans
