You're right, but this is the side effect of 'releasing early' and responding to custom feedback. You're usually safe to make drastic changes when its just the

You're right, but this is the side effect of 'releasing early' and responding to custom feedback. You're usually safe to make drastic changes when its just the web application but APIs are a different story. The world of APIs is about stability and backwards compatibility, but sometimes this just isn't possible. If you remove a feature or drastically change how something behaves then it isn't possible to make it backwards compatible. If it is a drastic enough change then even the version numbers won't save you. Perhaps you completely changed how some data is persisted or queried. Its really hard to justify keeping old/broken things around when you probably just wrote and released that a month ago and now you've taken a different approach. In the end, it seems how APIs are versioned and supported completely depends on the maturity of your product. I imagine that eventually you want to get to the point where you're only adding to the API and not removing or reworking entire calls. And perhaps then you won't need the version numbers at all. But for now, they might be your only safety-net for your customers.