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Comment by sametmax | Hacker News Reader

An article in their blog, at least, explaining their decision and making an official apology. It's good to let people know about it, but it's unprofessional to not publicly acknowledge it. At the very least it's a matter of respect for your community.

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Official apology for retiring a free API?

Seems to me that when you intentionally lead people to believe that they can depend on you for something in a way that they wouldn't otherwise have, you create an obligation for yourself to keep that promise.

Should be that way, anyway.

In the case of Google, it's been building product during the last 10 years by doing the following:

- 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.

Why do they need to apologize?

Because they wasted people's time building on their platform? A successful API requires trust that it will continue, or there's no point in using it. Erode the trust, erode the power of the API publisher.

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.

And in this computer age, we have to suspect keeping an API available is just some cloud resource of negligible expense. Shutting them down may feed some Google manager's OCD impulse, but can't be saving any money.

There is not just a computing resource cost involved - keeping an API around means continuing to support the quirks of that interface, which means code complexity and maintenance costs, especially when the system the API talked to gets refactored and/or overhauled. Google's internal refactoring strategy frequently relies heavily on a monolithic code repository and the ability to rebuild the world; the more that interfaces are unable to change the harder refactoring becomes.

+1000 to this. The "API" that developers see is the tip of the iceberg for what actually goes into publicly exposing a service to developers.

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

Um, they are also planning to discontinue the consumer-focussed Google+ Hangouts user experience that the API allows building apps for; Hangouts is being pivoted to be an enterprise messenging product. This change in direction has been announced previously, and is referenced in their information on the API discontinuation.

(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.)

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