A Large-Scale Empirical Study on Web API Versioning Practices
August 2023
Web APIs are constantly evolving to meet changing business requirements and user needs. When these changes break backward compatibility, API providers need to manage multiple versions simultaneously. However, the empirical landscape of API versioning practices remains underexplored.
This study analyzes 2,224 web APIs from various sources to understand how API providers handle versioning in practice. We examined both the technical implementation patterns and the broader ecosystem trends.
Our analysis reveals that URL path versioning dominates the landscape, used by approximately 60% of APIs. This is followed by semantic versioning patterns and header-based versioning approaches.
Most APIs adopt simple integer versioning (v1, v2, v3), while semantic versioning (major.minor.patch) is less common but growing in adoption among newer APIs.
Only 23% of APIs provide clear deprecation timelines, and even fewer offer automated migration tools or comprehensive backward compatibility guidelines.
This study provides the first comprehensive empirical foundation for understanding web API versioning practices at scale. The findings inform both API design guidelines and tooling development for better version management.
We collected data from multiple sources including ProgrammableWeb, RapidAPI, and direct API documentation analysis. Our methodology involved:
The complete research methodology, detailed findings, and implications for API design are available in the full paper:
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