Platform Updates: Operation Developer Love

January 2, 2013ByZhen Fang

Bundling Breaking Changes to Quarterly

In 2011, we committed to a 90 day breaking change policy, which provided developers with 90 or more days to update their apps. Today, we are excited to announce that we're going to start bundling breaking changes on a quarterly basis.

In the past, a developer impacted by multiple breaking changes may have needed to update their apps each month. Going forward, changes will be announced at the same time each quarter to make it easier for you to plan for changes and build higher quality apps.

This change will start with the April 2013 update (announced below), and in April we will announce the changes going into effect in July 2013. Please note that due to the importance of user privacy and security, these changes are excluded from the policy. See Change Policy for more information.

Jan 2013 Breaking Changes

As announced in October, the following breaking changes go into effect next Wednesday, January 9th, 2013:

Removing unused splash_screen_url and gamebar_image_url properties
Removing Dashboard REST API methods
Using canonical URLs when fetching data using link_stat table

April 2013 Breaking Changes (90-day notice)

The following changes can be enabled/disabled using the "April 2013 Breaking Changes" migration until April 3rd when they will go into effect permanently for everyone:

Removing ability to POST to USER_ID/questions
As it's no longer possible for users to create questions, we will remove this functionality from the Graph API. POSTs to USER_ID/questions will fail.
Removing version property/column
We will remove the 'version' column from the 'group' FQL table and the 'group' Graph API object.

For more information, see the Developer Roadmap.