Microsoft is axing this seven-year-old Windows app

By Willow Roberts Published August 12, 2024

As spotted by Windows Central, Paint 3D will stop receiving updates and be removed from the Microsoft Store on November 4 of this year. Although it was once intended as a replacement for the classic Paint program, Paint 3D will be outlived by its predecessor and some of its best features have been transferred to the older app instead.

However, anyone who downloads Paint 3D before the cutoff date should be able to carry on using it past November.

First released in 2017, Paint 3D was meant to be an exciting upgrade for Paint users and enthusiasts that brought a modernized UI, layers, PNG support, transparency, and 3D modeling features. And people didn’t hate it — but what they did hate was Microsoft saying it wasplanning to deprecate the old Paint program. After the internet made its dissatisfaction clear, Microsoft posted on its blog, saying it had decided to keep Paint and move it to the Microsoft Store where anyone could download it for free.

But why do people still love the old Paint app so much? Well, part of it is nostalgia, and part of it is ease of use. Practically anyone who has ever used a computer in the past 40 years knows how to use MS Paint — and some of those people are not interested in learning anything else. The old Paint app is also noticeably faster and more responsive than Paint 3D, and that’s an important factor for a lot of people.

Eventually, Microsoft began giving in to Paint’s popularity, giving it some of Paint 3D’s features in a 2023 update, including layers, transparency, and background removal. It then received AI-powered tools for Copilot+ PCs, allowing people to generate images with specific art styles directly from the app.

Now, with this news about Paint 3D’s demise, it’s clear that Microsoft has officially given up on trying to replace Paint or make it irrelevant. There are still a lot of features Paint 3D has that Paint doesn’t, so perhaps there could be more updates coming in the future — but the whole 3D part of Paint 3D never really caught on anyway, so Microsoft can probably just forget about that.