Google Earth, farewell to the desktop client by 2027: but those who have it can keep it

Google has set June 2027 as the closure date for the desktop client of Google Earth, the program that has allowed users to soar over the planet from their PC screens for years. The announcement came from a community manager on the official support forum of the service: from that date, the application will no longer be downloadable, and to view satellite images, the smartphone app and the browser version will remain available.

However, the discontinuation is softer than the deadline suggests, as the June 2027 limit only concerns new downloads: on the server side, nothing will change, so installations already present on computers will continue to function even afterward. The real horizon is different. Google will no longer publish updates, and a frozen software is at the mercy of the first change that breaks its compatibility, whether it comes from Google APIs or the operating system. This means that when (not if) this happens, there will be no expectation of a fix to bring it back to life.

Features that web and mobile do not replicate

Several comments on the thread point out that the PC client offers tools absent in the other versions: the measurement of areas with irregular perimeters, ground visibility analysis, the overlaying of custom data and images. These are marginal details for those who open Google Earth out of curiosity, but part of the daily work for serious users, from mapping municipal technical networks to managing agricultural lands.

Alternatives do exist, and almost all are outside the orbit of Mountain View. The community mainly points to QGIS, an open-source project rich in plugins and capable of accessing the same mapping datasets as Google, followed by KDE Marble. Neither of these is a painless replacement, but both cover a large part of the professional functions that the Google client will leave orphaned.

In the background is the well-known trajectory of many Google services closed over the years, from Reader to Picasa. Some hope that the client’s code will be freed and entrusted to the community: this is an idea that is circulating, but the announcement does not currently consider it in any way.