These days you may have been looking for a GIF in WhatsApp, x, Discord either Bluesky and the results have not seemed the same as always. The feature is still there, the GIFs have not disappeared, although they may you miss someone in particularnor has anything been broken on any of those platforms, but an important piece that was behind many of those searches has changed. Google has closed the Tenor API for third-party applications.
Tenor is one of the great GIF libraries on the internet. Google bought it in 2018 and since then its animated image search engine has been used both in its own services and in applications from other companies. The API, acronym for Application Programming Interface o Application programming interface, is the tool that allowed, in this case, other platforms connect to their database to display the GIFs within their own applications.
When a user opened the GIF selector in WhatsApp, X, Discord or Bluesky and typed a word to find a reaction, a scene from a series or a specific meme, that search went through Tenor. The user did not know that he was connecting to a third-party service because everything was integrated into the application itself, but The provider that served a good part of those results was Google through Tenor.
That’s what has changed this June 30. Google stopped accepting new requests to use the Tenor API on January 13 and set the last day of June as the date for Completely disable existing agreements and integrations. According to Google, the API is closing ‘as part of an ongoing effort to focus resources on improving our core products.’
Tenor does not disappear, but Google keeps it only for its products. The GIF service website will remain active and Google uses its API on its own platforms such as Google Messages either gboard.
Consequences of changing GIF providers
The affected platforms have been forced to change providers of this type of content. X, for example, has indicated that she has been ‘forced to migrate’ due to the closure of Tenor, although You haven’t detailed what service you use instead. Discord started testing Giphy and klipyrival Tenor services, as alternatives in January. WhatsApp, for its part, replace Tenor with Klipy.
The user, on the other hand, finds that they can continue sending GIFs, for example, on WhatsApp, but the results that appear when searching for them are different. If you previously entered a specific word and the same GIF that you frequently used always appeared, You may not find it now, it may appear below or it may have been replaced by others.. Not all providers have the same library or order results in the same way.