Most people who write software for a living have one thing in common - they don’t want to be stuck supporting all of the software they’ve developed forever.

A few areas of the software industry try to use this practice to their favor and go a different direction — operating systems work to be compatible with old software as long as possible. “Linux doesn’t break user-space,” Windows ships with compatible run-modes and macOS even had Rosetta, a software that allowed you to run software created before they switched to Intel CPUs.

Even some cloud providers try to keep deprecation to a minimum so they can always say “we won’t let you down.”

There are multiple reasons why it could be a good idea to stop providing an API feature, but not being a company of the size of Microsoft or Amazon is enough of a reason to stop serving parts of your API at some point in time.

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