Retiring check-in replies

[David Hu]

Hello Foursquare developers!

We're making an announcement here to share an upcoming change to the Foursquare platform. Our consumer app has evolved a lot over the last year, with more changes on the horizon. As we’ve refined the product, the picture of how developers fit into our ecosystem has changed as well. 

Because of this evolution, we’ve decided to turn off check-in replies from connected apps and take down the associated app gallery. Both of these changes will happen on October 31 (requests sent to /checkins/reply will start 404’ing on that date), and on October 28 we will temporarily return 410’s to /checkins/reply for a few hours in a brownout test. 

As the Foursquare experience becomes more streamlined and effortless, the basic interactions fundamental to connected apps replies increasingly feel out of place. We still believe in connecting apps with users in Foursquare, but think the best way to realize this dream is to take all the amazing things you’ve taught us and re-think these interactions from the ground up.

In the meantime, our Push API continues to be supported, so if you have an iOS or Android app, we encourage you to transition your check-in replies to system-level notifications (i.e., APNS and GCM). This allows the same kind of interactions as check-in replies in a format your users are already familiar with. We are also still keeping the ability for developers to add posts to a user’s check-in. 

If you have any questions or comments, don’t hesitate to get back to me. As always, to stay up-to-date with the latest from the Foursquare API, follow @foursquareAPI. This mailing list will remain announcement-only, but to get community help with the API you can turn to our forum on StackOverflow. And of course, you can always reach us directly on Twitter or through a...@foursquare.com.

Best,

David