14 DAY TRIAL // Google Reader will officially go dark on July 1, leaving millions of users with no option to read their daily news unless they act quickly to move all their feeds to another service.
While Google’s decision to discontinue Reader is clearly affecting a lot of users, it also has negative consequences on many other platforms, including iOS and Windows 8.
The number of apps developed to work with Google Reader is astonishing on iOS and surprisingly big on Windows 8, even though Microsoft’s operating system is quite a new product on the market.
Google has already confirmed that it had no plans to create any other Windows 8 apps, so there’s no official Reader tool in the Store, but third-party developers have designed an impressive number of clients in this regard.
All these apps would have to be removed from the Store, unless their developers update them with new options or add support for other web-based alternatives to Google Reader.
At this point, there are nearly 60 apps displayed in the US version of the Store when you search for “Google Reader.” Not all of them are Reader clients, obviously, but all of them boast at least one feature that is more or less related to this particular service.
In the meantime, Google is giving users the chance to export their subscriptions and move to another similar service by July 1, so those who have already found a suitable replacement should do it as soon as possible.
"So, on July 1, 2013, we will retire Google Reader. Users and developers interested in RSS alternatives can export their data, including their subscriptions, with Google Takeout over the course of the next four months," a Google official said in a statement.
It remains to be seen whether all Google Reader apps would be removed from the Store once the service is shut down, but we’ve contacted Microsoft for a word on this so we promise to keep you updated.