Will Ricoh Brick your Theta?

Not quite, but if you’re not careful you’ll lose some of the advanced shooting modes.

Ricoh announced that it is retiring the Ricoh Theta App* and replacing it with the Ricoh 360 app as of December 2024.
Why have they done this? For the last year or so Ricoh has been promoting its 360 Tour solutions, the Theta360 app is designed to shoot and publish directly to a Ricoh Tours and wants everyone to be aware of it.

But as of this writing, the Theta360 app is seriously flawed.  A wifi connection is needed to shoot in the field, certain advanced functions like AEB are not supported.

What can you do to protect your investment?
Don’t upgrade firmware until 2025 and only if there have no issues identified by users
Backup your phone so you can recover the Theta app if it disappears from the app store.
If you have an old phone, buy a new one with the latest OS and install the Theta app.
Keep an old phone with a functioning Theta app and never update the OS or app.
Tell Ricoh you wish them to maintain the Theta app or provide equivalent function in the Theta360 app.

We really hope Ricoh changes its mind and continues to support and develop the Theta app.

*NOTES: We only have the Google translation from Japanese at this point, there may be errors. We will update the post if an English translation fundamentally changes things.