Sunset: the word that usually means a date exists
Sunset is the retirement word most often attached to an actual date, which makes it the one worth searching a changelog for. When a company uses it, there is usually a calendar entry behind it, and the useful follow-up question is which surfaces that entry covers. As of 2026-09-22.
| Usually implied | Still to be established |
|---|---|
| A date exists somewhere | Whether it covers every surface |
| A decision has been made | Whether it can be pushed back |
| An announcement was written | Whether a successor is named in it |
| Access will end, not just support | What happens to material held inside |
Inclusion rule. Usage as it recurs across the notices read for this register. No vendor here publishes a glossary. Order. What the word carries first, then what a reader still has to find.
1Searching for the word is a reasonable habit
Because it usually accompanies a date, the word is a better search term than deprecated when trying to establish whether a model has a future. A changelog that uses it has probably written a date down somewhere nearby.
That habit fails where a vendor has no changelog at all, which covers most of the applications in this register. There the word will never appear because no announcement is ever made.
2One word, several surfaces
A model can be sunset in a consumer product while remaining reachable through an interface, or the reverse. Those are two dates and coverage routinely reports only the first, which is how a five-month gap goes unnoticed.
So the follow-up question matters more than the word. A reader who stops at the headline has the date that applies to somebody else's use of the product.
3What it never settles
Material. A closure can end a service and a library at once, and the word carries no information about which. The one documented case in this register ended both, with deletion after an export window.
That is recorded in the stored work column rather than in the vocabulary, because it is a fact about one notice rather than about the language.
A definition rather than a dated entry: no line above is a vendor statement. Where this word turns up in a real notice, the wording and the date are on the one dated closure here. Nearby terms: Advance notice, General availability, Preview model.