> App Engine fees were raised. APIs that had been free for years were deprecated or provided for a fee.
From where I'm sitting Google has been pretty rough on independent developers recently.
I think their lack of caring (or understanding?) indy devs is best summed up by the Google+ API. Read-only is understandable as they get off their feet, but you can't even get a user's profile stream (you can only fetch profiles one by one).
Now that the Buzz API is shut down I have yet to find a way to "share" anything programmatically on Google. How can you be social without a share API?
Google's recent behavior was central in our decision not to embrace their technologies and APIs. If they're going to either be suddenly shut down or have prohibitive, anti-startup pricing applied to them then why should we hitch our wagon to their horse?
Its not just independents, we're working with one of the largest US companies and they don't want to license (and by license I mean happy to pay for) google maps (for a traffic app) because the Goog can't guarantee that the maps will remain ad free.
From where I'm sitting Google has been pretty rough on independent developers recently.
I think their lack of caring (or understanding?) indy devs is best summed up by the Google+ API. Read-only is understandable as they get off their feet, but you can't even get a user's profile stream (you can only fetch profiles one by one).
Now that the Buzz API is shut down I have yet to find a way to "share" anything programmatically on Google. How can you be social without a share API?