Google+ API Shutdown

Legacy Google+ APIs have been shut down as of March 7, 2019.

Developers should have received one or more emails listing recently used Google+ API methods in their projects. Whether or not an email was received, we strongly encourage developers to search for and remove any affected dependencies on Google+ APIs from their applications.

The most commonly used Google+ legacy APIs that are being shut down include:

  • Google+ REST API
  • Google+ Web API
  • Google+ Android SDK
  • Google+ Domains API
  • Google+ Pages API

Note that we have built new implementations for several people.get and people.getOpenIdConnect APIs that are documented as belonging to the legacy Google+ APIs, including those listed above. The new implementations will only return basic fields necessary for sign-in functionality. More information can be found below.

As previously announced, as part of these changes:

  • The Google+ Sign-in feature has been fully deprecated. Developers should migrate to the more comprehensive Google Sign-in authentication system.
  • Over the Air Installs is now deprecated and has been shut down.

To help mitigate the impact of the shutdown, we have made the following changes to aspects of the Google+ APIs shutdown.

  • We have created a new implementation of several people.get and people.getOpenIdConnect APIs that will only return basic fields necessary for sign-in functionality such as name and email address, if authorized by the user. The new implementation only allows an app to retrieve the profile of the signed-in user, and can return only basic profile fields necessary for user sign-in functionality.
  • While we still recommend that developers migrate to alternative APIs such as Google Sign-in and Google People API, for cases where developers are unable to move over before March 7th, existing calls made to the legacy Google+ people.get and people.getOpenIdConnect APIs will automatically be served by this new implementation at the same HTTP endpoints as before.
  • Likewise, requests for some OAuth scopes will no longer fail as previously communicated. In most cases scope requests such as those used for sign in and usage not related to Google+ will no longer return an error. However, other scopes that authorized access to Google+ data such as Circle and Stream information will still no longer be granted. See full outline of scope behavior here.
  • While we strongly encourage developers to migrate to the more comprehensive Google Sign-in authentication system, for cases where developers are unable to move over before March 7th, scopes required for Google+ sign-in will now be remapped to existing Google Sign-in (not Google+) scopes, which should allow these legacy applications to continue to use Google+ Sign-in until they can migrate.
  • We are working with third party developers to help manage the transition and may implement additional mitigations in limited cases where the issue would impact hundreds of thousands of users. For example, we may allow temporary access to legacy Google+ APIs for broken, non-social apps that are using the API primarily for sign-in purposes.

Developers should still remove any dependencies on Google+ APIs from their applications as failure to do so will most likely break their applications. Developers may consider alternative APIs such as Google Sign-in and Google People API for their needs.

Google+ integrations for web or mobile apps have also been shut down. Please see this additional notice.

While we’re sunsetting Google+ for consumers, we’re investing in Google+ for enterprise organizations. They can expect a new look and new features -- more information is available in our blog post.