Early this November, Microsoft plans to remove Paint 3D from its eponymous store and stop updating it altogether. Although Paint 3D had been touted as the latest version of Paint, it was only a matter of time before this happened, as interest and use of the software has rapidly declined.

It may be a little hard to believe, but Microsoft's Paint app has been part of every version of Windows for almost 40 years. But with the Windows 10 Creators Update in 2017, Microsoft thought it could offer a better version and offered Paint 3D, with key features to support 3D models and rendering.

However, Windows Central reports that despite some genuinely good features, the seven-year-old app has been slowed down and will no longer be available for download from the Microsoft Store after November 4, 2024, and will not receive future updates . [Frankly, this news is not surprising. Especially since Microsoft itself has been very enthusiastic about Paint lately, with its background removal tool and generative AI system, to name just a few recent changes.

Like many of my colleagues on the PC Gamer hardware team, I really like Paint and use it on a daily basis for basic annotations, image format changes, resizing, etc. For more complex work I usually use GIMP (and occasionally Photoshop), and when I worked in engineering I would set up AutoCAD, Inventor, and Fusion 360 for 3D-related work.

What I didn't need were only fragmented versions of these tools, and given that Paint 3D was promptly consigned to software history, I strongly suspect I am not alone.

Windows 10 may still be the most popular Microsoft operating system in the world, but it hasn't saved things like Cortana and the Tips tool from being quietly relegated to the net space. At least “Paint 3D” can join the ranks, proving to be quite useful.