On a side note, the API was so broken, badly documented and useless that when we evaluated embedding an app into hangouts it just seemed as a half-arsed effort by Google to expose an API, and it was clear that they didn't really want people building apps inside hangouts. which is a shame, it seemed as a nice platform to extend with collab tools. I'm not at all surprised this got pulled.
That doesn't seem to qualify as "quietly" to me. What did the author expect -- a full-page ad in the New York Times?
Should be that way, anyway.
- offering a free product; - letting people build stuff with it; - create some sort of business model and profit.
Google relies on the community to live. e.g: there would be no android without dev creating app for it, so they provide a system API letting you create something on it. Without that, Android would be an empty shell.
It's a win-win situation, but to work it needs respect from both sides. Here, I don't see any kind of respect from Google, just another beta product trashed.
They have the right to do it, but as a developer, I have the right to not want my time wasted. Hence, if Google wants its community to thrives, it needs to be nice with the people being part of it.
Having been burned by Google API shutdowns before, I just don't use them any more. Obviously they're under no obligation to maintain APIs, but if they want people to keep using them for whatever reason, maintaining trust is important.
Yes there's quite a bit of internal maintenance that goes on (as mentioned, lots of things change frequently, though generally people refactoring chunks of code will "upgrade" your code for you, since if they don't they can't submit their changes since you were a good engineer and wrote defensive unit tests to protect your code).
Maintaining a public API can also mean having: - Documentation (up to 15 languages) - Sample code/example apps (up to 7 languages) - Support (Stack Overflow, Quora, etc.) - An on-call rotation
(And keeping a zombie API available without maintenance, which is non-neglible in cost, is in someways worse than discontinuing it even if the service it interacts with still exists.)
Breaking peoples product is bad enough, but not taking the time to make a clean announcement such as on their official blog seems unprofessional to me. Hence the "quietly".
FTA:
> the notice came in the form of an updated Frequently Asked Questions page outlining the termination, and an email to developers active on the platform.
Any developers using the API in their product would've received an email.
It's possible they do not see any significant use. It's also possible they contacted some developers directly.
You are making some assumptions here to reach the conclusion they are acting unprofessionally.
Seems to cover anyone with an interest in the API more effectively than posting on any of Google's many blogs would.
All of these can be banned from HN and I'd be happy.