Please consider creating a *stable* API

[Thijs van Dijk]

Call me crazy, but although I'm all in favour of API versioning, I think having versions that are deprecated after just four months (and completely shut down after eight months) makes very little sense.
This way, client applications will go from working to buggy to nothing in little over half a year, and the cycle seems to repeat every four to five months. That's just ludicrous.

I'd only expect this level of breakage if, for example, I were automating Ad submissions by using PhantomJS to simulate manually entering the form. This way, every CSS update would potentially introduce bugs. However, for an Interface explicitly designed to Program Applications, the current experience is sub-par.
For comparison, if I remember correctly the Twitter REST API has gone from version 1 to 1.1 in the past three years. That's it.

Frankly, I'm fed up with having to do constant client library updates; I'd much rather get on with my actual job.
If you could somehow create an "LTS version", where my application will only catastrophically fail every two years, I'd sign up in an instant.

[Anash P. Oommen (AdWords API Team)]

Hi Thijs,

We've settled on a 3-release-per cycle to strike a good balance between the stability of the API, and access to newer features that AdWords releases on a regular basis. We also try to time the releases such that in many cases, you can skip over a release and go directly to the next one.

If you find AdWords API to change pretty frequently, i recommend giving AdWords Scripts a try. We try to shield the users as much as possible from frequent changes in Scripts, but even there, a 3 year cycle like Twitter's API is not realistic, since there are product feature changes that affect user scripts (e.g. UI discontinues a particular feature).

Cheers,
Anash P. Oommen,
AdWords API Advisor.

[Anash P. Oommen (AdWords API Team)]

*3-release-per year