Hacker News Reader

Comment by endemic | Hacker News Reader

I will never integrate with a 3rd party API unless I have some sort of contract which prevents them from yanking the rug out from under me. Sadly, the sort of developer-hostile TOS that Instagram uses is all too common these days: "Instagram may change, suspend, or discontinue the availability of any Instagram APIs at any time. In addition, Instagram may impose limits on certain features and services or restrict your access to parts or all of the Instagram APIs or the Instagram website without notice or liability." (https://www.instagram.com/about/legal/terms/api/)

View on HN

Then you're never going to be able to integrate with any APIs. Even the best free APIs have clauses that the provider isn't liable for any damages caused to you due to their changing their mind about the business they want to be in.

In this case, though, Instagram gave people over six months to transition to the new process and workflow, and for us, our approval took less than a week. IMHO, this is a good example of the right way to transition applications over.

They should have done a soft shutdown to alert developers. Half of the developers didn't even know about the upcoming change because Instagram emails just end up in junk.

They've had a notice at the top of https://www.instagram.com/developer/ since late last year.

>> Any app created before Nov 17, 2015 will continue to function until June 1, 2016. On that date, the app will automatically be moved to Sandbox Mode if it wasn't approved through the review process

Let's be real, after a project is finished, no developer is going to randomly keep watching the docs page of one of the probably many APIs they used for it.

But they also were emailing - I got like five emails for my personal projects warning me that things were changing. Plus it was reported in the tech press:

http://www.macrumors.com/2015/11/17/instagram-new-api-change...

http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/17/just-instagram/

I'm really not sure what more people expect instagram to do.

We never got any emails from Instagram.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com