Atlassian moved the end of support for Connect from December 2026 to 31 January 2027, and says breakages will increase after that date. Connect apps have not been able to ship updates since March 2026. If your Confluence site runs apps, here is a check that takes about half an hour and tells you which of them are at risk.
How big this is right now
I pulled the Marketplace's public API this week. As of October 2026 there are 6,723 cloud apps; 999 are still on Connect, and 952 of those have had no release since March 2026. In August the Connect count was around 1,475, so roughly a third migrated in two months. The rest is the list worth checking against your own site.
The part that catches people out: nothing switches off on a date. Connect apps degrade. A macro renders on some pages and not others, settings stop saving, then an error box appears where the content used to be. Nobody is notified; you find out when someone opens the page.
1. List what you have
Settings, then Manage apps. Write down every app and its vendor. Ignore the ones you know you are about to remove anyway.
2. Check each listing for two signals
- A release dated 2026. The single most useful signal: somebody is still there.
- The "Runs on Atlassian" badge. It means the app runs on Forge, inside Atlassian's infrastructure, and the end of Connect does not affect it.
An app last released in 2023 or 2024, with no badge, is the case to plan for. An active vendor with other Forge apps may still move it; an app whose vendor has gone quiet usually will not be rescued in the time left.
3. Ask the vendor once
A one-line email: "Do you have a Forge migration planned, and when?" Most vendors answer within days. No answer in two weeks is an answer too.
4. Measure how much you depend on it
For macro apps, open one page that uses the macro, note its name in the editor, and run the CQL query macro = "that-name" through the REST API. Sometimes the answer is four pages and the problem disappears. Sometimes it is every team dashboard, and you know where to start.
5. Check where the data lives
Most apps keep content as ordinary page text or attachments, which stays yours whatever happens to the app. Apps with their own storage are the painful case: export before anything breaks, while the app still works well enough to export.
6. Replace early, side by side
Both apps can be installed at the same time. Moving a space calmly over a month is a different job from rebuilding a dashboard in an afternoon because it went blank on a Monday. If the replacement is a macro, copy each old macro's settings into a page or spreadsheet now, while it still renders.
Is Forge better, or just churn?
Some of both. Two things genuinely change for an admin. Page content stops travelling to vendor servers, because a Forge app with the "Runs on Atlassian" badge cannot send it out; for anything under a compliance regime that is the whole argument. And a vendor's outage stops being your outage, because there is no vendor server in the path.
Disclosure: I build Confluence apps on Forge, three of them for jobs whose Connect predecessors stopped being maintained: CQL Search (query results on a page), SVG out (clickable SVG diagrams) and Table Exporter (tables to Excel). We keep notes on what each of those did and what replaces it, our apps and others, here: Connect end of life, in plain words.
