If we are developing a library and want to introduce a breaking change, we can simply bump the major version and publish it. Developers can freely choose if, and when, they want to migrate. However, the process is not so trivial for APIs because for the following reasons:
- For every version of the API, the API provider must serve and maintain a different instance of the service. This can be a huge overhead.
- Different versions of the API would still use the same set of data, so you must design a data structure that is compatible with all versions. Sometimes, this may require you to have redundant fields in your data.
- If the changes are too drastic, developers may keep using the older version, possibly prolonging the ...
