On 31 August 2026 two items on Salesforce's retirement list came due at once, and they have been reported since as though they were one thing. If you manage a field team, the difference between them decides whether you need to act this month.
Two retirements, not one.
The Salesforce Maps mobile app is retired. Salesforce's notice states the standalone app is removed from the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store on the retirement date, and that copies already installed on a rep's phone receive no further security updates, bug fixes or support. Salesforce does not guarantee it keeps working.
Maps Live Tracking Mobile subscriptions have ended. The notice, published on 8 August, honoured subscriptions to 31 August. After that date, in Salesforce's own words, reps can no longer generate new geolocation data. Salesforce points customers towards its included Mileage Administration feature, the Check In feature, or a third party, and it names TripLog as an example.
Those are different products with different consequences. The first is an app your reps download. The second is the live location layer your managers were watching.
What did not change.
This part matters, because a good deal of what has been written this week overstates it.
Salesforce Maps itself has not been retired. The desktop product continues. Territory planning, route optimisation and the geographic reporting your admin built are all still there, and you are still paying for them. Salesforce's stated remedy is to migrate users to the Maps Mobile tab inside the main Salesforce mobile app.
So if you read that your mapping has been switched off, that is not what happened. What happened is that the dedicated field app your reps used every day is gone, live tracking has stopped, and the replacement is a tab inside another app. Whether that is a minor inconvenience or a real problem depends entirely on how much of your operation lived on the phone.
What you lose if you do nothing.
One line in the retirement notice has been almost entirely overlooked, and it is the only genuinely time sensitive item here.
Salesforce advises customers to export any geolocation data stored in Maps Live Tracking object records they wish to keep. That history, every logged visit location and tracked route, sits in Salesforce objects. It is not regenerating. If your organisation lets the subscription lapse and later tidies up the associated objects, the record of where your team has actually been goes with it.
If you have not exported it, do that before anything else. It is the one action with a closing window. Everything else here can wait a fortnight.
Your three options, honestly.
One. Move your reps to the Maps tab in the Salesforce mobile app. This is the path of least resistance and it is free, in the sense that you are already paying for it. It is the right answer if your field team's use of Maps was light, if your reps already live in the Salesforce app, and if losing live tracking does not break a process. Your admin will need to update mobile navigation and tell people where things went. Expect a support burden in week one.
Two. Keep desktop Maps and accept the phone is now a gap. Plenty of organisations used Maps mostly for planning: territory design, routing that gets exported, coverage analysis. If your reps opened the app to check a route and little else, the practical loss may be small. Be honest about whether that is really true, or whether it is just the cheapest thing to believe.
Three. Move the field layer somewhere built for the phone. If your reps' day genuinely happens on a handset, capturing sites, logging visits, taking photos and working a territory, then a mobile experience delivered as a tab inside a CRM app is going to keep disappointing them. This is the moment to look, because the switching cost is never lower than when the thing you were using has just been taken away.
We would say that, so treat option three with the scepticism it deserves and go and try things. The point of listing all three is that two of them do not involve buying anything.
How to decide in an afternoon.
Ask your reps one question, and ask it before you ask your admin anything. What did you actually open the Maps app to do?
The answers usually sort into three groups. Checking a route for the day is replaceable almost anywhere. Looking up which accounts are nearby is replaceable, with some work. Capturing what happened at a site, with photos and notes, while standing in a car park with one bar of signal, is the one that quietly does not survive a move into a CRM tab. It is also the one nobody mentions in the planning meeting, because it never appeared on a requirements list.
If that third group is where your value sits, the mobile experience is the decision, not the mapping.
Getting your data out.
Two exports, in this order.
Live Tracking history. Export the geolocation records from the Maps Live Tracking objects, as above. Closing window, do it first.
Your locations. A standard account or lead report from Salesforce, exported to CSV with the address fields intact, is the portable version of your territory. Whatever you move to should accept that file directly. If a vendor cannot import a plain Salesforce CSV export without a services engagement, that tells you something useful about the next two years.
One tip that saves an afternoon whoever you move to. Salesforce exports an address as separate street, city, state, postcode and country fields, and geocoding fragments spread across five columns goes badly. Add a formula field to the report that joins them into one full address column before you export.
We have written up the mechanics of that second export, including the columns worth keeping and what does not come across, as a step by step guide: Moving from Salesforce Maps. It is a CSV import with nothing to install in your org, which for most admins beats waiting on an integration review.
A note on what you will read elsewhere.
Several vendors published retirement guides this week and the quality varies. Some describe the whole of Salesforce Maps as retired, which is wrong. Some quote app store ratings for the retired app to make a point about quality, which is fair enough but is not the same as telling you what to do on Monday. And Salesforce naming a single third party in its own notice is a distribution advantage for that vendor, not a recommendation you should read as an endorsement.
Check anything you read against the two Salesforce articles themselves. They are short.
Frequently asked questions
Is Salesforce Maps being discontinued?
No. The standalone Maps mobile app is retired and Maps Live Tracking Mobile subscriptions have ended. Desktop Salesforce Maps continues, and mobile access moves to the Maps Mobile tab inside the main Salesforce mobile app.
Can my reps still use the app they already have installed?
Salesforce states that installed copies receive no security updates, bug fixes or support, and it does not guarantee continued functionality. Treat it as unsupported from 31 August 2026.
Has the app actually been removed from the App Store?
Salesforce's notice states it is removed on the retirement date. Listings can take time to disappear, so you may still find it. That does not make it supported.
What replaces live tracking?
Salesforce points to its included Mileage Administration feature for distance travelled and the Check In feature for validating that someone was where they said, or to a third party for continuous visibility.
Do we need to do anything urgently?
One thing. Export the geolocation history from your Maps Live Tracking object records if you want to keep it. The rest can be planned properly.
Last checked 3 September 2026, against Salesforce retirement notices 005103356 and 005314199. If you are weighing up a move, the side by side is on Pin Drop vs Salesforce.
