Amazon shuts down personal file storage service to focus on photos – TechCrunch

Amazon’s consumer-focused storage service, Amazon Drive, will be discontinued within the next year, Amazon announced today. In an email to users, the company said it is taking the opportunity to “more fully focus” its efforts on Amazon Photos, Amazon’s answer to iCloud Photos and Google Photos.

Amazon Drive customers must retain saved files until December 31, 2023; from January 1, 2023, file uploads will stop working. Photos and videos will be transferred to Amazon Photos automatically, but other file types must be downloaded manually from the Amazon Drive web panel.

Users currently subscribed to paid Amazon Drive plans can cancel their subscriptions now and receive a potential refund. Cancellations can be made online or via the Android and iOS apps — at least before the apps are removed from Google Play and the App Store, respectively, on October 31.

Amazon launched Amazon Drive as Amazon Cloud Drive in 2011, initially offering tiered, pay-as-you-go storage plans for both Amazon Prime and non-Prime users. In November 2014, an API began rolling out that allowed third-party developers to integrate Amazon Drive into their own apps to store things like game settings, preferences, and other app state data in the cloud.

Unlimited plans for Amazon Drive were introduced in 2015 and discontinued two years later. Shortly thereafter, storage was limited to 5GB for non-photo uploads. However, Amazon Prime members and Fire Tablet owners. free unlimited photo storage is stored.

Competition was probably the cause of Amazon Drive’s demise. After all, countless providers offer cheap cloud file storage today, including Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, and OneDrive. Amazon Drive’s pricing wasn’t even particularly competitive—the service charged $119 a year for 2 TB, the going rate for the same amount of storage on Dropbox and Google Drive.

According to According to Statista, Google Drive was the most popular cloud storage service as of September 2021, followed by iCloud and OneDrive.