Changes to deprecation policies and API spring cleaning
By Adam Feldman,
APIs Product Manager
It’s 2012. These days technology moves fast and we want to keep our developer products moving
and innovating fast, too. In an effort to align our pace of development with the market, we
did a careful analysis of our API deprecation policies. Based on our conclusions, we've
decided to adopt a one-year policy for some APIs, remove the policy for other APIs and make
the policy itself simpler and clearer. This doesn't mean we have changed the way we think
about our APIs - we are more committed than ever to offering stable and relevant APIs to our
developer community.
Most of these changes will happen over the next several years, but today we are giving you
advance notice. As always, we will strive to keep changes to a minimum and announce them in a
timely manner.
One-year API deprecation policies
As part of our effort to evolve our developer platform (like introducing the
Google
APIs Terms of Service), we are moving some services to a one-year deprecation
policy, a common industry practice among similar APIs. The four services moving to a one-year
policy are:
Google App Engine, Google Maps/Earth APIs and YouTube API will wind down their
current 3-year deprecation policy and will transition to the one-year policy in April 2014.
Google Cloud Storage keeps its current one-year policy. To be very clear, we are not
deprecating the APIs themselves.
Clearer deprecation policy language
For the above APIs, we've shortened our deprecation policy to be clearer and more concise. The
new policy simply states that we will strive to provide one year notice before making breaking
changes. For details, see each API's Terms of Service, such as the
Google Maps/Earth
APIs.
Removal of deprecation policies
For Google's other APIs, we are removing the deprecation policy - not the API. In most cases,
this change will not take effect until April 2015. Check the following affected APIs' Terms of
Service for details:
Accounts
API,
AdSense Host
API,
Chart Tools API,
Checkout API,
Contacts API,
Custom Search API,
Documents API,
Doubleclick for
Publishers API,
Feed
API,
Google
Apps Admin APIs,
Libraries API,
Orkut API,
Picasa Web Albums API, and
Prediction API.
During the remainder of the deprecation period, these APIs will also benefit from the clearer
deprecation policy language. Our commitment to the underlying APIs remains unchanged. We will
continue to work very hard to communicate any changes to our APIs well in advance, regardless
of the APIs' deprecation policy.
Retirement of older APIs
In addition, we are announcing the deprecation of several older APIs and versions. Please
visit the documentation for each API for more information about the deprecation period and
suggested alternatives:
Our commitment to developers
Our change in policy is designed to make it easier for us to bring you the technology you’ve
come to expect from Google: technology that excels at ease-of-use and scalability, and enables
you to focus on building your unique application. Our team remains committed to existing APIs
as well as building powerful new Google technology into our developer platform.
Adam Feldman is a Product Manager, focusing on all of Google's APIs and making sure
Google provides the best possible platform to developers.
Posted by Scott Knaster,
Editor
