Comment by jasontsui | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasontsui | Hacker News Reader

The author is trying to get on the outrage train when there is no compelling reason for it. The college kids he cites? A project with 2 likes. Splitting a Papa Johns pizza? Killer use case. OP seems to be grasping at straws to find concrete reasons for the API to exist.

"Drivers, dog walkers, handymen" are mentioned but author doesnt include an actual example - those were all examples supplied by Venmo itself...3 years ago. Who are the developers hes talking about when he says "community that stuck with Venmo"?

And finally, unlike Twitter, which has an plethora number of ways to be consumed, searched and experienced that would be better as different apps - Venmo does not. Its just a P2P payment system.

The way I see it, Venmo has accomplished the following -

1. Deprecated old features (save resources, reduce complexity)

2. Found new way of building profitable and sustainable relationships w other businesses, rather than just a wild west API.

Terrible read, file this under- "How TO Run a Platform"

The biggest API integration I know of is Splitwise. Their Android app has 500K+ installs and it's probably the same ballpark on iOS, which puts them leagues above a college kid with 2 likes.

I always wondered about this app. Have been using it for years and no idea how they stay afloat.

Because they are owned by Braintree (big payments processor) who is owned by PayPal (who used to be owned by eBay before being spun out to be independent)

If it can make them support other services like Square Cash that is it all for the better.

Splitwise will continue to work and run. The API is not being shut down, they are simply not authorizing new API applications. The article is wrong and massively misleading.

I noticed the headline changed.

I agree that the article's examples are great, but you don't need examples to convince me that a zero-warning API shut-off is a bad thing. Regardless of how many people are using the API (if it's non-zero), why not send them emails 3 months in advance? It costs you virtually nothing and almost certainly prevents this article from being written.

> why not send them emails 3 months in advance?

Sounds like that's basically what they did.

https://twitter.com/williamready/status/703349746992197632

> The @Venmo API is still available to existing users

If you care about developers ...

I agree that there might not have been concrete reasons for the API to exist (especially considering PayPal has their own API), but shutting down the API with no warning or migration plan was a mean move. Even if the only projects using it are small I still think the developers of them deserve some warning. They still worked hard on those projects and are probably proud of the work they did.

Never the less, no notification or announcement is a pretty college kid move

You dismiss the pizza thing but the PapaJohns website still has the Venmo stuff on it so that's at least one large business with a broken website.

And this is why I never read TechCrunch articles. They are a tabloid, and as far as I can tell have no place on HN. The comments never seize to be amusing though.

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