As Windows Central has spotted, 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 has outlived its predecessor and some of its best features have been ported over to the older app instead.
However, anyone who downloads Paint 3D before the deadline should be able to continue using it after November.
Paint 3D was first released in 2017 and was meant to be an exciting upgrade for Paint users and enthusiasts, bringing with it a modernized interface, layers, PNG support, transparency, and 3D modeling capabilities. And people didn’t hate it – what they hated was Microsoft’s announcement that it was killing off the old Paint program. After the internet made its discontent clear, Microsoft posted on its blog that 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, partly it’s nostalgia, and partly it’s ease of use. Virtually everyone who has ever used a computer in the last 40 years knows how to use MS Paint – and some of those people aren’t interested in learning anything else. The old Paint app is also significantly faster and more responsive than Paint 3D, and that’s an important factor for a lot of people.
Eventually, Microsoft began to give 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 gained AI-powered tools for Copilot+ PCs that allowed users to create images with specific art styles right from the app.
With this news of Paint 3D ending, it’s now clear that Microsoft has officially given up on replacing Paint or making it irrelevant. Paint 3D still has a lot of features that Paint doesn’t, so maybe there could be more updates in the future – but the whole 3D part of Paint 3D never really caught on anyway, so Microsoft can probably just forget about that.
