Deprecated API considered unusable?

Products

• CA API Developer Portal

Issue/Introduction

A deprecated API is supposed to be one that will soon be disabled or removed, but it could be used for a while.

Why is a deprecated API considered unusable?

Environment

5.3.2

Resolution

A deprecated API isn’t literally unusable — you can often still call it and it will work as expected. However, in software engineering, “deprecated” has a specific meaning that makes it effectively unusable from a best-practice standpoint:

1. No Future Guarantee

   • Deprecation is a warning from the maintainers: “This will go away at some point.”

   • If you keep using it, your code may suddenly break when you upgrade the library, framework, or platform.

2. Lack of Support

   • Deprecated APIs usually stop receiving bug fixes, optimizations, or security patches.

   • That makes them risky, especially if they’re part of something security-sensitive.

3. Poor Compatibility

   • New features are often not designed to work with deprecated APIs. Over time, you may be locked out of improvements, forcing a painful rewrite later.

4. Code Quality & Maintainability

   • Teams generally treat calls to deprecated APIs as “technical debt.”

   • Many organizations enforce linters or CI rules that treat deprecation warnings as errors, making the API effectively unusable in production code.

So, while deprecated doesn’t mean “broken right now”, it does mean “already obsolete — relying on it is unsafe.” .you really shouldn’t use it.