You should see the mess that is eBay’s API or the utter cluster ******** that is Tesco’s utterly cluster******* API I have to deal with at $dayjob. Or the utter stupidity of Shopify with it’s stupid rate limits and zero bulk end points. The only API that seems ok~ish is Amazon MWS, and thats like 5 years old with no major changes, but I shudder the day they do…
Sure v3/v5 are deprecated but they are there to use (for now) and we have a time frame.
This, sure bad, method of “kill” the old stuff to herald in the new, will adjust how Twitch will perform it’s API roll out, and I have read that the new API, (and webhooks when they go live) contains within it end points for ~90% of current Kraken API calls (v3/v5 combined)
One could argue that Twitch’s third party API offering is getting better, we just have to get past this bump from a company that (perhaps) finally have the right expertise on board, post Amazon Acquisition to guide the ship in the right direction and turn round and say “all of this shit is wrong we gotta change it”.
As a third party dev having used a lot of API’s, you just gotta deal with it.
People have been demanding Webhooks for years, I’m quite happy with pubsub myself. this might be a case of “give the people what they want”.
The webhook follow end point will mean, a LOT of traffic on kraken will go away, due to the number of streams using follower alerts.
The roadmap is (hopefully) backed up with thoughts like “we’ll offer this which will reduce that so we can then do this other thing”. Phased roll out of sorts.
Twitch isn’t under any obligation to give us anything.
Either way, I imagine they are also changing a LOT of the internal infrastructure (teams HAHAHAH), in order to facilitate the third party API, and/or internal system load, as unlike some other (general) sites, they don’t really use their own API that much to run their own site. Which would solve a lot of problems for us, if Twitch used it’s own API more. But that a different story.