Google seems to be facing a trust problem here that its competitors don't, due to its history of shutting down popular services, even those that were being used internally and even those that it had been recently hyping to the press. Due to this unusual context, perhaps it would help if Google were to increase this promise from 1 year to 10 years (or 5 years or 3 years).
Yep. Their trust problem is also very well earned both from the APIs they've killed/changed and from the long list of Google products in the graveyard.
Also have killed APIs/Products that are extremely difficult to transition from with short notice. For example, they gave ~4 months for the Google Wallet for the web transition, and no data portability for businesses with users on subscriptions.
Stripe, for example, has a data portability clause that allows you to move card data to another payments processor that meets some compliance standards.
Regardless of if you get 4 months notice or 1 year notice you still have to do the work to migrate and you're still stuck with the sunk cost of investing in/learning a doomed platform.
That's why I wouldn't build a business on Google, because they have a long history of killing things when they aren't wildly profitable/successful. A $10m/yr profit product is considered a distraction of valuable engineer time unless it has some ulterior goal for the company.
And I'm not saying they should change -- they do what's right for them. One engineer working on some distraction project could instead be moved to ads quality and end up making a change worth anywhere from hundreds of millions/yr to billions.
That's one of the few examples that hasn't burned developer trust. But it's still not a shining example -- there were times of price changes and rate limit changes.
