“Aamir F.”, on behalf of the Google Earth Team:

We’re continuing to make Google Earth on web and mobile (Android | iOS) the best place for people to get helpful geospatial insights. While you can continue using the legacy Google Earth Pro desktop app, it will no longer be available for new downloads beginning on June 25, 2027. We encourage using web and mobile for the best Google Earth experience.

This is a two-factor loss: the MacOS app is Intel-based and, thus, will no longer be supported by the system come next year.

Christoph Grützner, researcher at the University of Jena:

Discontinuing Google Earth desktop does not come unexpected, but it’s terrible news. The web tool is utterly useless for me and many geo folk.

There’ll be workarounds for most features, but not for easy 3D view of historical imagery and for sharing placemarks.

Carlos Moffat, faculty at the University of Delaware:

Still one of the most approachable and efficient tools for planning fieldwork. I used GEarth in our latest Antarctic cruise just a few months ago.

On the Google Earth community thread, you will find comments from people with all sorts of interesting use cases for the desktop app. I opened the web version today to see if it supports my limited use cases — it does — and I was greeted by a dialog advertising Gemini features, of course.