Deprecating API V1.x

Question

API V2.0 has been out and pretty stable for about 3 months now, and we've become pretty confident in it.

Additionally, API V2.0 consumption has now grown past the V1.x family. Now seems like a good time to start really deprecating V1.x.

Don't panic, we're not shutting V1.x down

We're committed to supporting people who have built on our API, but it's desirable to move resources off of the older, inferior API and onto building new bits of V2.x.

So here's the plan for deprecating V1.x:

• we're disabling registration for new V1.x apps
• new sites will no longer be added to V1.x
  • they will not appear in /1.0/sites or /1.1/sites
  • they won't get api.newsite.stackexchange.com endpoint

Registration is being disabled immediately*, the last site to get API V1.x endpoints will be Libraries (launched into private beta 2012-05-22).

In the very long term we will be looking at eventually shuttering V1.x altogether, but traffic is still far too high for that.

Naturally, we still strongly advise moving all existing V1.x code onto the V2.0 family.

_{*In the next build.}

Answer 1

Mmmm. I can live with this for Six to Eight, because I'm planning an update this summer anyway. However, referring to http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/05/stack-exchange-api-public-beta-starts/ - the original "Beta begins" blog post - we find...

If you build to our API, we will support you. We’ll be on Stack Apps daily helping out in any way we can, and listening to all your feedback. If you’re contributing your valuable time building an app on our API, the least we can do is provide a stable platform for you to build on. We plan to have a solid 1.0 API that is reliable and supported for a very long time. That’s a promise.

It's only been 4 months since V2 left beta, and I just received an e-mail saying that "we are starting down the path that leads [to shutting off the V1 API]".

Even if the V1 endpoints are still around for the foreseeable future, you're saying that anyone using V1 is shut out of any new Stack Exchange sites. Any app built of V1 and claiming to navigate the entire "Stack Exchange" network, well....just doesn't anymore. Application end users won't know why; the apps were built against an API that purported to supply access to the entire network, so applications were unsurprisingly "sold" as such.

Moreover, any API code that was published against V1 has also just become entirely worthless, as new users can't register apps that use the V1 API. All open source V1 API projects are now in the dustbin. This has created a severe disincentive to spend any time on general open source code against V2, as when you get around to V3, all that code might be in the trash as well.

I confess, this doesn't feel like an API that's "supported for a very long time".