Arc stops working December 22 as The Browser Company closes signups and drops mobile AI on November 23
Arc stops working December 22, 2026: new accounts closed October 22, mobile AI and tab sync end November 23, and data must be moved before the shutdown.
Arc is the design-forward browser that made The Browser Company’s name on macOS in 2023 and later reached Windows and phones, winning a loyal following for sidebar tabs, Spaces and Split View. On October 22, 2026, the company published a farewell page titled “A farewell to Arc” stating that Arc will stop working on December 22, 2026. The page splits the exit into three dates: no new accounts after October 22, Browse for Me and the other AI features gone from iOS and Android on November 23 along with sign-in and tab sync, and on December 22 the macOS and Windows builds will become unusable, accounts will be deactivated, and account-related personal data will be deleted within 30 days.
Key points
- The three dates switch off three different things: October 22 closed new signups while adding a full export and a smoother Dia import for existing users, November 23 ends mobile AI features, sign-in and tab sync, and December 22 ends the desktop browser itself.
- The export is one-way. The official FAQ says: “As of December 22, 2026, we will no longer be able to identify or retrieve Arc user data for data requests” — after that date even a formal data request cannot reach the data.
- The successor, Dia, is desktop only. Its download page reads “Currently available on macOS (Apple Silicon) and Windows 11,” the homepage says “Available for macOS and Windows,” and neither page mentions iOS or Android anywhere.
Three dates, two platforms
This table follows the company’s plan. Arc’s wind-down runs on two tracks: the desktop stops in one step, mobile stops in two, and the two mobile platforms end differently.
| Date | macOS and Windows | iOS (Arc Search) | Android (Arc Search) |
|---|---|---|---|
| October 22 | New accounts closed; existing users see no change, Arc keeps working with basic updates, and the release adds full export plus Dia import | Export open tabs via Tab Switcher, Settings, Export Data | Export data via App Settings, Export Data |
| November 23 | No change | Browse for Me and other AI features off; no sign-in or tab sync; the browser keeps working as a lite version | The same AI and sync shutdown, with no lite-version promise |
| December 22 | Arc cannot be accessed or used, accounts deactivated, account-related personal data deleted within 30 days | Nothing further listed by the company | Arc Search deprecated entirely, pulled from Google Play and removed from devices it is installed on |
The closest thing our site has covered is Google retiring Gemini Gems, where the old assets convert into the new format automatically. Arc puts the migration burden on the user, and the contrast is instructive: automatic migration and a hard collection deadline are two very different exit designs with very different costs.
The company’s stated reason
The Browser Company gives security maintenance as the reason. The farewell page says “Keeping a browser secure takes constant, dedicated work that is only increasing in the age of AI,” and says Dia was written from the ground up for today’s standards, so engineering and security now go there. The page makes four migration promises: passwords, bookmarks, extensions and history come across; Spaces, Folders and Tab Groups import with data intact; “Dia now surpasses Arc benchmarks in stability, speed, and security”; and the browser features Arc users rely on are free in Dia, with AI optional.
The third promise is the company’s own benchmark claim with no metric, test method or date attached, so it belongs in the claims column. The first two you can check yourself during import: Spaces become Profiles in Dia, Folders become Tab Groups, and the vertical sidebar, pinned tabs and favorites all survive.
Dia’s positioning also lines up with what we wrote earlier. Our piece on the five routes to browser control files Dia under “put the agent inside the browser,” next to Comet and Atlas. The reason the company gave stops at security maintenance; it does not explain why Dia’s capabilities could not have been folded into Arc instead.
Getting your data out
The desktop export lives in the FAQ. On macOS, open Arc > Settings from the menu bar, choose Advanced, then Export Data. On Windows, press Ctrl + , or open the Arc menu and choose Settings, find Export Spaces and tabs under Advanced, then select Export Data. If you already uninstalled Arc, the company still lets you download it again with links for each OS and export from inside the app, provided you finish before December 22.
Anyone heading to Dia does not need to export first. Dia imports from Arc during signup; existing Dia users can pick Dia > Import from Another Browser on macOS or Import from another browser in the Windows app menu, again before December 22. If you only want a list of links, the desktop export writes one, and on iOS the path runs through the Tab Switcher’s Settings. Android gets two different instructions from the company: the FAQ “Can I export my tabs out of Arc?” says to tap the Tab Switcher (the stacked tabs button) in the bottom-left corner, then Settings (⚙️), then Storage, then Export data, while the October 22 entry under “What about Arc Search on mobile?” says to go to App Settings > Export Data. The two name different levels of the app, and the page does not say how one maps onto the other. Until December 22 the Arc Help Center chat still handles individual cases.
One detail worth noting: if you hold both a Dia account and an Arc account, the December 22 cleanup touches only personal data tied to the Arc account.
The 2025 letter
On May 26, 2025, CEO Josh Miller wrote in “Letter to Arc members 2025” that “we’re not trying to shut Arc down,” and the same letter explained why open-sourcing Arc was not straightforward: Arc runs on a proprietary internal SDK called ADK, and ADK is also the foundation of Dia, so releasing Arc would mean handing over the company’s core asset. The letter also conceded that active development of the core experience had stopped, leaving Chromium upgrades and security fixes.
That open-source line circulates as if it were new this week. TechCrunch’s October 22 story frames it as “Miller previously noted,” pointing back to the May 2025 letter, and reading it as old context is the only way the timeline lines up: feature work stopped in 2025, and the deadline arrived in October 2026.
Ownership changed in between. Atlassian’s September 4, 2025 press release announced the agreement to acquire The Browser Company for approximately $610 million in cash, inclusive of the acquired company’s cash balance. The 10-Q filed October 31, 2025 recorded the close: on October 20, 2025 Atlassian acquired 100% of the equity for approximately $610 million, about $488.3 million of it cash and the remainder in Class A common stock subject to continued vesting. The headline figure matches; the structure does not, since the release describes an all-cash deal and the filing describes cash plus stock. For how it actually closed, the 10-Q is the better source.
The same press release says Arc and Dia together “have amassed millions of users” without splitting the figure by product, so it cannot be quoted as Arc’s user count.
What others say
TechCrunch reads the shutdown as closing a chapter that opened in 2025, when the company conceded that early adopters loved Arc’s novel interface but a “novelty tax” and complexity kept it from the mainstream. It also reports that social media reaction was largely disappointment, with open-source requests resurfacing.
The Verge adds a practical pointer: Zen, built on Mozilla’s Gecko engine, is a frequent recommendation for people who want an Arc-like experience. How-To Geek splits its alternatives into tiers — Dia first, then Chromium options such as Opera, Edge and Brave, then Gecko options including Firefox, Tor and Zen — and warns that none of them reproduces Arc’s experience. Digital Trends takes the nostalgic route, re-listing Spaces, Split View and uBlock Origin shipping by default. 9to5Mac puts the timing plainly: users get exactly two months to move, and notes that OpenAI shut down its own AI browser Atlas this year in favor of ChatGPT’s in-app browser.
On Hacker News (226 points, 204 comments per the site’s own API), the criticism centers on trust. Commenter allenleee pulled up the May 2025 letter to compare promises; an0malous said never to trust a product that takes venture funding — enjoy the subsidized prices, but have your backup ready; jdgoesmarching asked why anyone would migrate to a browser from the team that just killed its last one after promising to maintain it. Others, like falloon, spent a year being angry, tried Dia anyway and admitted it is well built.
Our take
Two groups face real consequences. If you still use Arc, the only date that matters is December 22: export tabs, bookmarks and passwords to a file or import them into Dia before then, because the company says it will not be able to answer data requests afterward. Mobile users face a starker fact: Dia ships only for macOS on Apple Silicon and Windows 11, the iOS build survives as a plain browser, Android disappears entirely, and there is no first-party replacement to move to.
If you are considering Dia, read two official pages first. The pricing page contradicts itself within one page: the plan card lists Better Answers at $10 per month while the FAQ on the same page says “Better Answers ($20/month)”; Better Days is $100 per month; the free Better Browser tier excludes AI; and new users get a 14-day Better Days trial. The privacy policy, effective April 9, 2026, lists “the pages you visit using Dia and queries submitted to and responses created by the Dia Assistant feature” as content data it processes, and says enabling Sync sends that content off the device, encrypted end to end and not stored in readable form on the servers. For something that stays open all day, those two paragraphs are worth reading before paying or migrating.
What remains unknown deserves saying too: the company has published no Arc-specific user count, has not said whether Arc’s code will ever be released, and has not explained why there is no mobile Dia. That last choice may make business sense, but for Android users it means no option at all.
What to watch
Two dates on the official schedule are the only checkpoints left: mobile AI features, sign-in and tab sync stop on November 23, and the desktop client stops on December 22, with account-related personal data cleared within 30 days. If you are staying with Dia, installing it now and importing from Arc is the least work, and the old browser can keep running for a while as a reference. If you are moving elsewhere, land the export file first, then pick the daily driver.
Two questions no published material answers: whether Dia will ever get a mobile counterpart, and whether Arc’s code might be released as users keep asking. The company has given neither a date nor a direction on the first, and on the second there is only the conditional from the May 2025 letter — that it might happen if the day comes when releasing it no longer puts the team or shareholders at risk. Both remain open, and December 22 will not wait for either.