Briefcase has not had an update for 2 years and it's still working. We don't have any reason to believe it will stop working. The only real change here is that we are being explicit that it won't ever get an update.
@yanokwa thanks for having took time to reply to my rant. I actively take part to the development of an Open Source project, so I know well the pain of having to answer to grumpy users. Good to know that Briefcase is just not updated and that will continue to work for the foreseeable future. I was afraid of something like Aggregate vs Central data models
There are examples with Bash, PHP, Python for every API call in the docs. See https://odkcentral.docs.apiary.io/#reference/submissions/submissions/listing-all-submissions-on-a-form for an example. There is also ruODK if you use R
So is proved I'm blind, but let me see if I understand correctly with an example. If I want to download the photos sent with the submissions of a form I have first to download the full list with https://odkcentral.docs.apiary.io/#reference/submissions/attachments/listing-expected-submission-attachments then parse it on my own then use https://odkcentral.docs.apiary.io/#reference/submissions/attachments/downloading-an-attachment to download a specific attachment? Or maybe is just https://odkcentral.docs.apiary.io/#reference/submissions/submissions/exporting-form-submissions-to-csv with attachments=true ? Can I download data in between dates ranges? And does the previous download all the tables in case of a 1:n data model (i.e. repeating questions)? And how do I get the GeoJSON version of the submissions?
Feel free to ask me fork this questions in a separate thread, anyway I think I made my point, for a common user the API is the contrary of something simple to understand and use.
and we expect to provide more language-specific wrappers and documentation over the time.
I would also suggest to improve the language of the API, to make more clear also for mere mortals, non developers. Again a example from here: https://odkcentral.docs.apiary.io/#reference/submissions/attachments/downloading-an-attachment what is an attachment? a photo? a video? another thing? all/none of the previous?
I agree that software is getting more complicated rather than simpler, and that's the reason why our small team has to make these decisions because we have a lot of problems to solve for our users and very finite resources to do so. If Briefcase is critical to your workflow and you find in the future it doesn't work for you, consider hiring someone in the Marketplace to make the improvements you need.
See above, I know the pains of being part of an Open Source project with a very large user base and yet small resources at disposal. Still this is not an excuse to not do steps forward rather than backwards. I'm not saying that Central based ODK is worst that Aggregate ODK in fact I understand that is better on so many point of view, but easiness of usage is not one of them (also Collect has become cumbersome to use for some very basic users).