News: iWork.com Shutting Down

As Apple moves towards iCloud for more and more things, the writing was on the wall that its original cloud-based document service, iWork.com will be shutting down on July 31. The company sent out an email this afternoon to those who have used it over the years.

The service was always listed as a “beta”, so it’s not like anyone should be too heartbroken or surprised to see it go. The email below was sent to us from Apple:

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