I have determined that relying on Google products is just a bad idea.
I once included Google's V8 engine on a project I was working on. Google would regularly make breaking changes with no documentation. Developers were required to figure out the new interface on their own... occasionally you would find someone else on a forum somewhere who had reverse engineered it, saving you the time.
Sure, Google can do whatever they want. They have no obligation to people using their open-source projects. But he result is that many developers will be reluctant to use those projects in the future.
> But he result is that many developers will be reluctant to use those projects in the future.
For the short term foreseeable future, there's a continuing larger number of people coming in to the field who've not yet been burned, and will continue to choose Google libs/projects without that experience. Google doesn't seem to need to worry about burning a few bridges here and there, yet. Maybe they'll need to adapt in the next 10 years?
Google probably doesn't care whether developers use their open source projects -- they hardly make any money from it and they make 95% of their money from advertising.
If by "continuing effort" you mean, "parsing new errors in your build, realizing that functions you used have been removed, and finding no information on the web", then yes, I absolutely agree
I once included Google's V8 engine on a project I was working on. Google would regularly make breaking changes with no documentation. Developers were required to figure out the new interface on their own... occasionally you would find someone else on a forum somewhere who had reverse engineered it, saving you the time.
Sure, Google can do whatever they want. They have no obligation to people using their open-source projects. But he result is that many developers will be reluctant to use those projects in the future.