It’s official, Google Drive will soon no longer support Windows 8 and 8.1. This decision will take effect in a few weeks… and will also affect the 32-bit version of Windows 10.
It was to be expected, it’s now official, the Google Drive application will soon no longer support three of the older versions of Windows. We actually learn from The Vergethat the cloud storage and file sharing service’s desktop app will stop supporting Windows 8, Windows 8.1, but also the 32-bit version of Windows 10. The news comes directly from Google, which has set the terms of this end of support on a support page identified first by Android Police.
As a reminder, the Google Drive desktop application allows you to synchronize some of the files and folders on your PC with the Google Cloud, but also to save any photo or video to Google Photos. A particularly useful utility, therefore, but which you will have to do without on Windows 8 / 8.1, and on Windows 10 32-bit, from August, specifies Google.
When everyone is pushing you to migrate to Windows 11
Note, however, that the users concerned will still be able to continue to use the services of Google Drive… but through a browser, if the latter still supports the older versions of Windows affected by this end of support. That being said, the incentives to migrate to Windows 11 are generally becoming stronger. And the measure announced by Google proves to us, if necessary, that these incentives no longer come only from Microsoft.
As The Verge points out, the Windows 8 / 8.1 saga is also concluding more and more frankly. Microsoft has notably ceased to deploy its latest security updates on it and since January, technical assistance is no longer available for these versions either. Google, for its part, also rolled out the first version of Google Chrome in February that no longer supports Windows 7 or Windows 8 / 8.1. Same dynamic at Mozilla, which plans to do the same with Firefox next year.
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