Feature Maturity

Most of the HERE Geocoding and Search features are in an UNRESTRICTED and STABLE (aka "GA") state.

Some of the HERE Geocoding and Search features have the maturity level ALPHA or BETA, or the privileged level RESTRICTED. Such features will be tagged as such in both the developer guide and the API reference.

Maturity

API requests parameters and response fields can be tagged with one of the following maturity qualifiers: ALPHA, BETA.

• "ALPHA" tagged features are in mid-stage development. They can change or in rare cases be removed. No backward compatibility is guaranteed nor bug service level agreement (SLA) do apply. Customers using ALPHA features are advised not use them in production.
• "BETA" tagged features are in end-stage development. They are backward compatible and can not be removed. They have no major bug, but coverage, quality, performance, or test coverage is not considered final. customers can safely use BETA features in their applications if they accept those limitations and potential behavior refinements.

Privilege

API requests parameters and response fields can be tagged with the privilege qualifier "RESTRICTED". Such features are only available to customers having a specific contract with HERE. Unauthorized usages are typically leading to a http status code 403.

Backwards compatible changes

All HERE Geocoding and Search BETA and STABLE updates and bug fixes are implemented to preserve compatibility with existing applications. Major updates that significantly change the API behavior are released on a different URL.

The following request interface changes are considered backward compatible:

• Adding new endpoints
• Adding new optional parameters
• Adding new enumeration values
• Changing a parameter from mandatory to optional
• Softening a parameter constraint

The following changes in response structures are considered backward compatible:

• Adding new response elements
• Adding new enumeration values without changing the semantic of previous ones
• Switching from mandatory to optional for an element but still ensuring that the element will be populated for existing requests
• Adding new error subtypes
• Hardening constraint for a response element value