Google Code

Google's free host for open source projects, killed by GitHub and by the spammers who moved in when everyone else left

Shut down
19902026

Google Code was Google's free hosting service for open source software, opened in July 2006 with Subversion repositories, an issue tracker, a wiki and downloads, and used at its height by tens of thousands of projects including Android tools, jQuery plugins and MySQL forks. GitHub took the culture and the projects with it from 2008 onwards. Google disabled new projects in March 2015, made the site read-only that August and closed it on 25 January 2016.

Timeline [edit]

  1. 2005
  2. March 2005 Launch
    code.google.com opens as a developer portal

    APIs, documentation and downloads.

  3. 2006
  4. July 2006 Feature
    Project Hosting launches

    Free Subversion repositories, issue tracker, wiki and downloads.

  5. 2008
  6. April 2008 other
    GitHub opens to the public

    The competitor that took the culture with it.

  7. 2011
  8. July 2011 Feature
    Git support added

    Five years after launch, three years after GitHub.

  9. 2015
  10. 12 March 2015 Shutdown announced
    New projects disabled, closure announced
  11. 24 August 2015 Decline
    The site goes read-only
  12. 2016
  13. 25 January 2016 Shutdown
    Project Hosting shuts down

    Tarball exports stay available through 2016.

The site through time

Browse code.google.com as it was, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

2006 2008 2010 2012 2014 2016 Full archive →

Ownership [edit]

Google 2006–2016 Founded Run by the open source programs office

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: Google announced on 12 March 2015 that Project Hosting would close: new project creation was switched off that day, the site went read-only on 24 August 2015, and it shut down on 25 January 2016, leaving downloadable tarballs of source, issues and wikis available through the rest of that year. Google said its own teams had been publishing on GitHub for years and that, as real projects left, running the site had become almost entirely abuse management.

Our analysis: Google Code lost to a better product, not to a business model. GitHub made the fork and the pull request the unit of collaboration while Google Code was still a Subversion host with an issue tracker, and once the interesting projects moved, the only thing left growing was spam. Google's exit was unusually decent for a Google shutdown: a year of warning, a migration tool to GitHub and Bitbucket, tarball exports, and a permanent archive of the abandoned projects rather than a deletion.

History [edit]

Free hosting, before the pull request

Google Code started in March 2005 as a developer portal for Google APIs, and in July 2006 it grew the part people remember: Project Hosting, free hosting for open source projects with a Subversion repository, an issue tracker, a wiki and a downloads section. It was fast, it had no adverts, it did not fall over, and for a few years it was where a lot of software lived, from Android build tools to jQuery plugins to the forks of MySQL.

Git support arrived in 2011, five years after launch and three years after GitHub opened. By then the argument was already lost. GitHub had made forking a social act: you clicked a button, you got a copy, you sent a pull request back, and the whole workflow lived in the browser. Google Code was a place to put a repository. Even Google was publishing new code on GitHub.

Left to the spammers

By 2015, according to Google's own open source blog, most of what remained on the service was abuse: people using the free hosting and free bandwidth to distribute binaries that had nothing to do with open source. Chris DiBona wrote that the administrative load had become "almost entirely abuse management".

On 12 March 2015 Google switched off new project creation and set the timetable: read-only from 24 August 2015, shut down on 25 January 2016, tarballs of source, issues and wikis downloadable through the rest of 2016. It shipped an exporter to GitHub, and Bitbucket and SourceForge both built importers. When the tarballs expired, Google left a static archive of the projects that nobody had moved, which is still the only copy of a decade of small, abandoned, useful code.

The domain today

code.google.com redirects to developers.google.com. The archive of hosted projects sits at code.google.com/archive, read-only and unloved.

Similar projects

Firebug Gave every browser the F12 key, then merged into them 2006–2017 Yahoo! Pipes Visual programming for the web, twelve years before it was fashionable 2007–2015 Google Gears Made the web work offline, then handed the idea to HTML5 2007–2011 Parse 500,000 apps had their back end switched off 2011–2017 Atom Killed by an editor built on the framework it invented 2014–2022 CodePlex Microsoft's open source home, closed because GitHub won 2006–2017

Sources [edit]

  1. Bidding farewell to Google Code Google Open Source Blog 12 March 2015 [archived]
  2. Google Code disables new project creation, will shut down on January 25, 2016 VentureBeat 12 March 2015 [archived]
  3. Google Code deader than Dillinger The Register 12 March 2015 [archived]
  4. Google Code is shutting down: what should you do next? Software Sustainability Institute 26 March 2015 [archived]
  5. Google Code Archive Google 25 January 2016 [archived]

Last verified: 18 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).