I think a law that forbids blocking third party clients (either through terms&conditions or technical means) would level the playing field a bit. Though I see issues around balancing the need of platforms to update their APIs and an API update essentially blocking third party clients who don't keep pace.
While I'd appreciate such a law, I doubt it would work in practice.
First-party can turn it into a cat-and-mouse game where they'll introduce some minor changes that require third-party apps to be updated over and over again. We've seen this happen with some education related app / system in Sweden where people built a better third-party app / client.
Finding a decent, enforceable solution this way is certainly not trivial.
Mandate that every API version that introduces breaking changes remains available for X years. Big companies do this anyway because there always are people using outdated first-party apps.
No. You didn't read my comment fully. Companies already support app versions that are years old, for various reasons — the most obvious one being that many people use older devices that run an OS that's no longer supported by the app in question, and others just don't ever update anything. So since they're already doing this right now, and have been doing this since forever, there's literally zero additional work involved.
Besides, no one is asking them to "deliver new functionality at a rapid pace", especially to feature-complete products. This whole "keep flapping your wings or you'll die" thing is a lie. It's fine for a product to be done. It's fine to stop. It's fine to go into maintenance mode.
Maybe there should be some sort of condition, like minimum MAU or something. Only regulate those that grow to be huge enough for many people to depend on them. This would exclude startups but would still apply to Facebook and Twitter.
How so? What prevents you from making new functionality available incrementally and in a backwards-compatible manner on the newest version of the API?
Besides, this would reduce e-waste from perfectly functional devices that are not longer functional because the cloud endpoint went away. So it would be good for the environment too.
You’ve just imposed a set of legal constraints on an entire industry there.
You genuinely can’t see how this might stifle creativity and add costs in a small, fast moving company? I can already hear the jaded developer conversations -
“Oh god, no don’t change that, we’ll be stuck with another ‘version 3 ‘ we have to support forever”.
And the managerial equivalent - “delivering X new feature will break existing APIs and as a result of the regulations we have to keep those running, adding time to the dev cycle for back/forward porting and increasing support costs, maybe hosting costs too, best shelve it”
It’s fine for slow-moving enterprise stuff, for everyone else it’s a crazy imposition. You can’t drop a feature you don’t want to support any more, you can’t completely change how one works, you’re constrained.
Of course it’s possible to work that way, but it adds load. In the context of “Europe doesn’t have enough fast moving home-grown tech”, legislating that would be precisely the wrong move.
