[nchase]

> GraphQL came about as a way for mobile clients to call backend services. At Facebook, once a version (of the mobile app) was released, it was essentially out there forever. Some people would simply never upgrade until they absolutely had to. > > The point of GraphQL is that you want to get away from thinking about versioning your API and cleanly upgrading because you probably can't. You can do versions but you don't have clean divisions. You'll mark a given field as "since v2.1". And fields that you have added can basically never be removed. The best you can do is make them return null or an error.

This nails it. For distributed apps where a client might never be updated, you can't really change your schema if you want to guarantee that your app works for everyone. You can build in a mechanism to prompt users to update to a later version, though, and that can be very effective.