Important Update on Mbed

Last updated 30 Aug 2024, by Will Lord.

This post was updated on 30 August 2024 to clarify support arrangements for Mbed OS

Today we wanted to share some important updates with the Mbed community:

  • The Mbed platform and OS will reach end of life in July 2026, when the Mbed website will be archived and it will no longer be possible to build projects in our online tools
  • The device software - Mbed OS - is open source and will remain publicly available, but is no longer actively maintained or supported by Arm
  • The Mbed TLS project is unaffected by this announcement and continues to be supported as part of the TrustedFirmware community project.

Mbed has been a hugely popular project since 2009, helping professional developers, educational users, and the maker community to create, secure, deploy and update thousands of applications on Arm-based hardware developed by Mbed partners and contributors. Embedded and IoT development has evolved and scaled significantly since it was introduced, and during this evolution, Arm has made significant investments in industry standards such as CMSIS, and in a suite of embedded and IoT development tools for both professional and academic use.

At the same time, projects supported by Arm like micro:bit, Arduino, and Raspberry Pi have gained momentum in educational settings and among the maker community, enabling many of the features that Mbed offered to become more widespread and accessible, from browser-based IDEs and hardware abstraction to code hosting and remote build services. We believe these needs are now best served by the wider ecosystem, without the need for direct support from Arm.

Arm remains committed to investing in IoT development, focusing on standards, tools, and educational content that we believe will serve industry and academia most effectively, as we continue to enable everyone to build the future of computing on Arm.

Recommendations for Mbed users:

  • We recommend that educational institutions begin to investigate a move away from Mbed as a platform for teaching embedded development. The Arm Education team is actively working on creating alternative teaching and learning solutions in time for the new academic terms starting Fall/Autumn 2025. We welcome feedback from the academic community on this. Reach out to the team at: education@arm.com
  • No new commercial projects should be started using Mbed, and any existing Mbed-based commercial projects should start to investigate alternative frameworks. For a list of frameworks please see the FAQs at the end of this document.
  • All users begin to migrate code and other data from Mbed.com to other platforms. An export tool is available in your Mbed account.

We will take a phased approach to support for the Mbed tooling and websites. Further updates will be shared in due course but for now all systems - Mbed.com, the Mbed forum, Keil Studio Cloud, and Mbed Studio - will continue to operate as normal.

Frequently Asked Questions

What happens to the Mbed website and forum?

The Mbed website and forum will operate as normal until further notice. We will provide ample notice of changes to these services.

What happens to the Mbed OS codebase?

Arm has already halted active maintenance and CI on the Mbed OS codebase. You should not expect to see any fixes or improvements before July 2026 and no support will be offered by Arm. This includes security-related support. After July 2026, the codebase will be archived in GitHub.

A community fork of Mbed OS – Mbed CE - is under active development. If you would like to continue contributing to Mbed we recommend starting here.

Can I still get support for my project?

As of today, Arm does not provide any support on the Mbed OS code base. This includes security-related support.

What happens to Mbed TLS?

The Mbed TLS project is not affected this change. Although it shares the Mbed name, Mbed TLS is now part of TrustedFirmware.org. Development of Mbed TLS continues as usual, with an active roadmap of feature releases (including LTS releases) and support as usual. For more details see: https://www.trustedfirmware.org/projects/mbed-tls/

I use Mbed OS in a commercial product. What should I do?

The Mbed OS terms of use will not change, and you can continue to use Mbed OS in existing commercial or non-commercial projects.

I used Mbed.com to submit coursework and share code as part of my course. What should I do?

We recommend using GitHub or GitLab for repository hosting and sharing. If you currently use Mbed.com-hosted Mercurial repositories, you can export the content from your account.

How do I get a copy of my code?

You can download a complete backup of your code, ready to be uploaded to a code-hosting service like GitHub or GitLab, from your account.

Will I be able to build my Mbed project after the OS is deprecated?

You will not be able to build an Mbed project inside Keil Studio Cloud or Mbed Studio, but it may be possible to build a project with GCC using the Mbed CLI. As of today, Arm does not provide any support on the Mbed OS code base. This includes the Mbed CLI.

How do I delete my Mbed account?

You can delete your account from the account management page on mbed.com.

What can I use instead?

A community fork of Mbed OS – Mbed CE - is under active development. If you would like to continue contributing to or using Mbed we recommend starting here.

For a free-to-use embedded development environment we recommend Arm Keil MDK v6 Community Edition, which works seamlessly with the CMSIS standard and CMSIS RTX RTOS:

For rapid prototyping and educational purposes, we suggest you investigate:

For an alternative RTOS we recommend:

For embedded Linux projects we recommend:

You need to log in to post a discussion