Hey folks -- what was the reason why we did this? I went down the rabbit hole and I can see that everyone agreed it was a good idea, but nowhere can I find an explanation as to why.

Cards on table: I had a "bug" filed on this recently (internal folks: b/64123162), and so I need to grok what the appropriate answer is (e.g. whether to put this support back, or say that we are not going to do it because ______).

@lukesneeringer, as I recall, it was mostly because the API key auth was outside of the normal authentication methods and I believe it was said that API key based auth was going away..or they(backend) were trying to not support it in the future.

@lukesneeringer the description @daspecster gave matches my memory. Sort of an extension of "Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules."

API keys are strongly being discouraged for Cloud APIs, especially for client libraries targeting backend languages. Omar has more details. :)

Thanks. :-)