Agreed. I'm gonna hazard a guess and say that they do it in order to avoid the cost of supporting older versions of their internal APIs. Interesting contrast to Facebook's engineering team, who maintains mobile apps for at least two years after their release:
Backwards Compatible: In a world of deployed native mobile applications with no forced upgrades, backwards compatibility is a challenge. Facebook, for example, releases apps on a two week fixed cycle and pledges to maintain those apps for at least two years. This means there are at a minimum 52 versions of our clients per platform querying our servers at any given time. Client-specified queries simplifies managing our backwards compatibility guarantees.
I didn't know they had such a liberal backwards compatibility policy until I saw this GraphQL talk, which is a pretty interesting overview of why / how they do it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQLzZf34FJ8.
Makes me wonder how much money / how many users Uber loses by not supporting older versions.
At work we (like Uber) own the servers and the clients, and even then it's very time-consuming to support backwards compatibility. Occasionally, we all but have to require an update. Ours don't leave you stranded, so it's not apples-to-apples here, but it's a thing.
Backwards Compatible: In a world of deployed native mobile applications with no forced upgrades, backwards compatibility is a challenge. Facebook, for example, releases apps on a two week fixed cycle and pledges to maintain those apps for at least two years. This means there are at a minimum 52 versions of our clients per platform querying our servers at any given time. Client-specified queries simplifies managing our backwards compatibility guarantees.
via https://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2015/05/01/graphql-int...
I didn't know they had such a liberal backwards compatibility policy until I saw this GraphQL talk, which is a pretty interesting overview of why / how they do it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQLzZf34FJ8.
Makes me wonder how much money / how many users Uber loses by not supporting older versions.