Apple Shutting Down iWork.com on July 31 Amid Transition to iCloud

Apple today sent out an email to users registered for its iWork.com beta noting that it will be discontinuing the service as of July 31. The discontinuation comes as Apple places its focus on iCloud, which offers users ways to keep documents in sync among their various iOS devices.

Dear iWork.com user,

Thanks for participating in the iWork.com public beta.

Last year, we launched iCloud, a service that stores your music, photos, documents, and more and wirelessly pushes them to all your devices. Today, there are already over 40 million documents stored on iCloud by millions of iWork customers. Learn more about iCloud.

With a new way to share iWork documents between your devices using iCloud, the iWork.com public beta service will no longer be available. As of July 31, 2012, you will no longer be able to access your documents on the iWork.com site or view them on the web.

We recommend that you sign in to iWork.com before July 31, 2012, and download all your documents to your computer. For detailed instructions on how to save a copy of your documents on your computer, read this support article at Apple.com.

Sincerely,
The iWork team

iWork.com launched as a free beta in January 2009, with Apple eventually intending to offer the service with tools for collaboration on iWork documents for a fee. The service never exited beta, however, and with iCloud offering new options for moving documents around the company has decided to eliminate the program. But while iCloud does offer a number of new features, it does not offer the level of collaboration tools envisioned for iWork.com.

The elimination of iWork.com will come a month after Apple officially shuts down its MobileMe services. Apple has continued to support MobileMe since the introduction of iCloud last year in order to give users time to move over to the new service. But as of June 30, MobileMe and several of its features such as iDisk, Gallery, and iWeb publishing will no longer be available.