Yes they did. If they deliver an OS upgrade and a bunch of apps stop working, the user will blame the OS upgrade regardless of the real reason. Raymond Chen (from MS) covered this well on his blog

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2003/12/24/45779...

This is software engineering 101, really, and the reason we have the concept of private interfaces in the first place: you bloody well expect first party developers to be able to change the private parts of the interface with abandon, knowing that third-party consumers of those interfaces will not break because of those changes.

However they acted differently for the wakelock api. In Android, there is a private api that allowed access to a list of wakelocks, which was used by many apps to provide the user with more information about what is keeping the system awake. However, their was a security implication (this was a real concern), so 4.4 made the api both private and inaccessible. (Private apis by default you can't use, but you can get around it by getting a reference using language-features). Unlike the sms situation though, they didn't provide a replacement api without the security issue. So now you need to root the phone in order to access the list of wakelocks.

While this may not affect most of the users of these apps, this is quite unfortunate, because these applications were especially handy on non-stock phones, which usually aren't easily rootable.