# Earliest Version of Apollo client which supports @defer fully

**URL:** <https://community.apollographql.com/t/earliest-version-of-apollo-client-which-supports-defer-fully/9127>\
**Category:** Client SDKs\
**Tags:** client, react\
**Created:** [June 1, 2025, 3:02pm UTC](https://community.apollographql.com/t/earliest-version-of-apollo-client-which-supports-defer-fully/9127 "2025-06-01T15:02:24Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![WEe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/dec6dc/32.png) [@WEe](https://community.apollographql.com/u/WEe)\
**Post date:** [June 1, 2025, 3:02pm UTC](https://community.apollographql.com/t/earliest-version-of-apollo-client-which-supports-defer-fully/9127/1 "2025-06-01T15:02:24Z")

</div>

Hey all!

As of right now, our current used version of Apollo client is 3.7.2, which to my understanding, supports @defer, to some extent? We need to add full support for @defer, but I’m not sure which version has full support for defer. Our api already supports this, but we need to make clientside support it as well.

It seems that since version 3.8.0, there have been some changes regarding updating cache, and it will effectively require big changes to our codebase. So, my question is, does using 3.7.2 version provide full @defer support, or do I need a newer version?

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![lenz](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex019/user_avatar/community.apollographql.com/lenz/32/4007_2.png) [@lenz](https://community.apollographql.com/u/lenz)\
**Post date:** [June 2, 2025, 10:14am UTC](https://community.apollographql.com/t/earliest-version-of-apollo-client-which-supports-defer-fully/9127/2 "2025-06-02T10:14:01Z")

</div>

Hi @WEe,  
could you specify what you mean by “full support” for `@defer`?

Generally, our `@defer` support hasn’t changed a lot since we released it, apart from some bug fixes - but that’s not a thing specific to `@defer`, you should _always_ try to stay up to date with updates to get bug fixes.

`@defer` still hasn’t made it into the official spec, so there is no “final” version.  
We do not support all different versions of `@defer` that have been suggested over time as that would bloat bundle size by a lot, and we also haven’t changed the version we support, as that would be a breaking change to people using it.  
We support the version of `@defer` that was specified on `2022-08-24`, which is shipping with `graphql` in the version `17.0.0-alpha.2`.

We are planning to make `@defer` support more pluggable in the upcoming Apollo Client 4.0, which would enable people to use Apollo Client with different versions of the defer spec without breaking changes and bundle size bloat.