Google is so famous for removing products that there’s an entire virtual graveyard you can explore. Google’s latest shutdown now has its own tombstone. As of today, Google has discontinued the Tenor API, the name of which you may not know. Although you’ve probably used it. Tenor is a searchable GIF database, which used to serve animated images on sites like X/Twitter, Discord, and more. Now it only serves Google; perhaps the tombstone is a little premature.
Like many Google products, Tenor started as an independent company. Google came along and bought Tenor in 2018, and continued to run it largely unchanged in the intervening years. Tenor was integrated into Google products like Gboard and Google Messages, but the API also gave other platforms a way to help users find, share, and save GIFs. It is similar to services like Giphy and Klipy.
In January, Google announced that it was going to start reducing that API access. It stopped accepting new integrations at that time and the end date has already arrived: as of June 30, the Tenor API no longer exists. Google, a company with nearly 200,000 employees and more than $130 billion in revenue by 2025, says it decided to stop supporting the Images API so it could better focus its resources. The real problem was probably that Tenor was free and Google didn’t see a way to make money with a GIF API.
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