Google+ APIs shutting down March 7, 2019
Update: This posting was updated on February 28, 2019 with important, recent
changes to aspects of the shutdown covering Google+ Sign-in, Google+ APIs, and Google+ OAuth
scope requests.
On March 7, 2019, we are shutting down the legacy Google+ APIs.
This has been a progressive shutdown where calls to affected APIs began intermittently failing
on January 28, 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:
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:
To help mitigate the impact of the shut down, we have made the following changes
to aspects of the Google+ APIs shutdown.
- If you would like to test your application with the shutdown behavior before March
7, you may do so by joining this Google
Group with a test user and then trying your application as that user.
Be sure to use only test with fake users and fake data. Do not test with your
production user accounts or data. Note that you will see the new behavior for
your fake users, regardless of which application you are testing with.
- 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 are also
being 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.
