Jamboard's shutdown named three whiteboard apps as landing spots

A staged retirement with a named destination

On 28 September 2023, Google Workspace announced it would wind down Jamboard, its digital whiteboard app and matching 55-inch hardware device, in two stages: the hardware would reach its Auto Update Expiration on 1 October 2024, and the Jamboard application itself would shut down entirely on 31 December 2024, with the announcement stating that Jam files would be permanently deleted at that point. Unlike a shutdown that simply leaves users to find their own way, Google named three specific successors in the same post: FigJam by Figma, Lucidspark by Lucid Software, and Miro, describing migration to those platforms as available “within just a few clicks.”

What owning the hardware added to the timeline

Jamboard was unusual among this batch's platform changes because it combined a software retirement with a physical device reaching end of support. Google's support page, a living document as retrieved on 16 September 2026, lays out a longer sequence than the original announcement alone: licence sales stopped on 30 September 2024, the Fleet Management service and Admin console controls ended on 1 October 2024 and devices dropped into an unlicensed mode, and web and mobile creation of new Jams stopped the same day. For an organisation that had bought physical Jamboard units, the hardware becoming an inert screen was a separate, earlier problem from the later loss of the app and files.

A plan that changed after the announcement

The 2023 announcement stated plainly that files would be permanently deleted when the app shut down. The support page, updated since, instead records that “Jams were converted to PDFs in 2025 and are available in Google Drive,” a materially gentler outcome than the original notice promised. That is worth treating as two facts from two different moments rather than a contradiction to smooth over: the original commitment was deletion, and the eventual practice was conversion and retention, which suggests Google revised its own plan after the announcement rather than that the announcement was inaccurate when it was written.

• Does a shutdown notice name specific successor products, or leave the choice entirely to you?
• If hardware is involved, does the device stop working on the same date the software and files do, or earlier?
• Has the vendor's support page been updated since the original announcement, and does it still say the same thing about your data?

Jamboard's wind-down shows a vendor doing more than the minimum: named partners, a Drive-based export, and eventually a softer data outcome than first promised. That it still took a hardware purchase out of service is the reminder that owning a device tied to a cloud app buys less permanence than owning the device alone.