RIP: Nexus 9 dies a silent death as it disappears from the Google Store

There’s a reason that I suggested the iPad Air 2 as the “Android tablet” to buy last holiday season. The HTC-made Nexus 9, which was the successor to the much-more-successful Nexus 7 series, just wasn’t a great tablet. We thought it was probably the best way to get pure Android in tablet form when it launched, but consumers never loved it, I never loved it, and tablets as a whole have become less and less useful for the general population as smartphones have gotten bigger.

Now, the Nexus 9 has finally died a silent death in its disappearance from the Google Store…

While Google reportedly removed the “Tablets” landing page from the Store yesterday and instead pointed it directly to the Pixel C page (via Android Police), today marks the official disappearance of the tablet from Google’s first-party retail store. And, somewhat unusually, the page that housed the Nexus 9 is completely gone and redirects back to the Google Store home page (usually, these pages will stay live for a while with the purchase button changed to “This product is no longer available”).

While today may mark its mostly official death, it could be argued that the Nexus 9 has been dead for quite some time. The tablet has been the subject of many an HTC fire sale, with markdowns as high as 40% or more off the retail price — down to around $240. That said, HTC is still trying to sell the tablet today at its original launch $400 retail price for the 16GB model. I think it goes without saying that that would be an unwise purchase at this point.

All things considered, while the Nexus 9 wasn’t the worst tablet to ever exist, it was just an OK tablet. And it was an OK tablet that launched with some shoddy hardware quality and lots of annoying performance issues, at a time when tablets were just beginning to wind down and huge phones like its sibling the Nexus 6 became more popular. In this writer’s humble opinion, it never really had a chance.