Facebook today released Graph API version 2.1, as well as updated Android and iOS SDKs that work with it. For those who don’t know, the Graph API is the primary way for apps to read and write to the Facebook social graph. The release means the new version is now available to all apps, and has also been set as the default version for all new apps.
At its f8 developer conference in April, Facebook announced the main way it would release changes to its Platform would be through new API versions. With this change came a two-year stability guarantee for core APIs, which today is being put to use: version 2.0 will be deprecated on August 7, 2016, after which all apps will automatically be upgraded to version 2.1. The 2.0 release arrived under four months ago, meaning it will have a life of less than 28 months.
Version 2.1 adds the following features:
- Pages are able to mention other Pages in posts published via the API. If you want to publish mentions of pages other than those managed by your app’s developers, you’ll need to submit for review by Facebook.
- /friends edge on the User object now provides access to total friend count. This is retroactively supported in v2.0 as well.
- The root node of v2.1 Graph API responses will always be a JSON object — rather than raw booleans, integers or strings.
- API v2.1 provides access to the data displayed in the new App Insights through a new ‘app_insights’ edge on the Application object.
- Field expansion syntax is now more concise.
- A new URL node makes it easier to access Open Graph and Share metadata for that URL.
You can upgrade to version 2.1 by downloading the latest mobile SDKs. Web developers can also declare “v2.1” in the version property when calling the init method of the JavaScript SDK and specify “v2.1” in their URLs when calling the Graph API.
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