← Back to Notes

Why is it that Apple can set up an API and leave it running for a decade but Google has to change their way of doing the same thing every 2 years and every consumer of it suddenly has to migrate to the Next Thing?

I've had to migrate Pushover to a different Google thing (push notifications, billing library, etc.) half a dozen times now and it always goes like this:

1. Receive e-mail that I have to migrate to some new version of a thing
2. Ignore it
3. Login to one of Google's dozen dashboards for something unrelated and see warnings that I have to migrate by such-and-such date
4. Read the documentation and see it's now much harder to do the same thing I was doing before with no benefit to me or my users
5. Nope out of it
6. Receive more dire e-mails from Google as the migration date gets closer
7. Read on Stack Overflow how to do it in a succinct way that condenses Google's awful documentation into a few steps, pointing out all the gotchas
8. Finally do the migration and hate Google just a little bit more