Google Maps JavaScript API drops its Heatmap Layer and Drawing Library — visualization.HeatmapLayer and drawing.DrawingManager are gone as of May 2026

Another quiet night for new vendor announcements, so tonight adds one detectable archive entry: the Google Maps JavaScript API removed its built-in Heatmap Layer and its Drawing Library (DrawingManager). Both are listed under Google's Completed deprecations, unavailable as of May 2026, and old code that still constructs them breaks — move heatmaps to deck.gl and drawing tools to Terra Draw. On the board tomorrow: the GitHub Copilot MAI-Code-1-Flash deprecation lands 10 September.

No new upcoming sunsets crossed the monitored sources or the discovery searches tonight, and no corrections are outstanding. The one item worth adding is a set of already-removed API features that a lot of front-end code is still calling. Tonight’s three re-verification flags were, again, the Microsoft pages that render their dates in JavaScript (Sentinel SAP connector, Azure Automation Python/PowerShell runtimes, Exchange Web Services); each was re-confirmed correct by hand against Microsoft’s release-communications API and the page metadata — not data errors.

New (archive): Google Maps JavaScript API removes Heatmap Layer and Drawing Library — as of May 2026

Two features that shipped with the Maps JavaScript API for well over a decade are now gone. The Heatmap Layer (google.maps.visualization.HeatmapLayer) was deprecated on 27 May 2025 “due to low customer usage” and is unavailable as of May 2026. The Drawing Library — google.maps.drawing.DrawingManager and its polygon, polyline, circle, and rectangle tools — was deprecated in August 2025 and is likewise unavailable; the release notes pin the actual removal to Maps JavaScript API v3.65.3b, dated 4 June 2026. Both now sit under “Completed deprecations” on Google’s deprecations page.

The code that breaks is exactly the older, un-migrated code least likely to be watching Google’s release notes. Google’s own guidance is to move heatmaps to a third-party library such as deck.gl (which has its own HeatmapLayer) and drawing tools to an alternative such as Terra Draw — both overlays that sit on top of the map rather than inside the Google library, so each is a rewrite of the affected code, not a config flip. Google states only the month for the deprecation milestone (“May 2026”), so this entry carries no single sunset day.

This entry is detectable: the lastcall CLI fingerprints the going-away classes visualization.HeatmapLayer and drawing.DrawingManager — the Google-namespaced forms — so it flags the legacy calls without tripping over deck.gl’s replacement HeatmapLayer.

On the board

10 September (tomorrow): the GitHub Copilot MAI-Code-1-Flash deprecation.
14 September: the Relay app and Microsoft Sentinel SAP connector agent retirements.
17 September: the Azure Maps Render v1 API retirement.

Further out: OpenAI’s Sora 2 video API shutdown (24 September), a cluster on 30 September, Exchange Web Services in Exchange Online (1 October), the GitHub Copilot model deprecations (2 October), OpenAI’s 23 October API removals, then .NET 8 and 9 end of support (10 November) and PostgreSQL 14 end-of-life (12 November). The full board with live countdowns is on the calendar.