How not to run an API (looking at you, Zoopla)

… or, the Zoopla Zombie API.

We have a client that is interested in integrating property search into their app, so I thought I’d take a look to see if there’s any APIs out there that would let me do that. A quick web search later, I see that Zoopla offer an API and developer site (both powered by Mashery), that looks just like it will meet my needs. Nice!

I sign up for a developer account and API key, and make a few manual requests to see what sort of data I get back. This looks good, it’s exactly what I’m after. So next step, I spend a few hours actually integrating the Zoopla property search API into our app. Share it internally because I think it’s cool, and everyone agrees. Job done.

Or so I thought. The next day, all API calls start failing, and looking a bit closer, my API key has been disabled. Not to worry, let’s look at their support forums, helpfully linked from their developer pages. I see there’s an API Forum, great, so I click on it… and uh-oh, alarm bells start ringing. It’s totally overrun by spam bots, and one of the very few active, non-spam posts is titled “API key still in waiting”. So I take a look at that, and there’s plenty of people who appear to have had the same experience as me (i.e. their API key got disabled automatically after a day or so). The last response from anyone at Zoopla in this thread was 2 years ago.

So, as far as I can make out, Zoopla used to have a working and supported API, but in the meantime appear to have abandoned it, while leaving all documentation and endpoints active, even though (unless perhaps you are a developer that started working with the API 2 or more years ago) it’s basically unusable. So I just spent wasting an entire day’s effort on something that, although it gave the appearance of it, was never going to be a viable solution. And judging from the forums, I am not alone.

Please Zoopla, if you abandon an API, at the very least do us all a favour and remove all public developer pages, so developers don’t waste time on a dead API. It may prevent the next developer getting quite as pissed-off with you as I am today.