How APIs Make Software Smarter and Businesses More Profitable

APIs have become a core component of all that means data exchange. They evolved into flexible, secure, and well-documented solutions whose primary purpose is to facilitate the data transfer between several software products.

Either you are a developer looking for data transfer solutions or a business owner who decided to provide an API; this article will present you with the advantages you can get by using an API.

What is an API?
What are APIs used for?
API benefits for the consumer
∘ User Experience
∘ Innovation
API benefits for the provider
∘ Productivity
∘ New business opportunities
How APIs are shaping the future

What is an API?

An application programming interface (API) is, in formal terms, a set of rules and protocols established that allows several applications to access data and interact with external software products, operating systems, or microservices.

But you can hear these types of definitions pretty much anywhere. They do not tell you very much about APIs, and sometimes they just create more confusion. You often can understand better after you start working with one and see it in action.

An API call is pretty much the same as making an HTTP request. The client makes a request formatted in a specific way, sends it to the browser to a particular URL, and receives a response that contains the requested data.

The only difference between an API call and an HTTP request is the response content. An HTTP request will return you some HTML, CSS, and Javascript files, while an API call will give you data formatted according to the protocol.

The most common formats are JSON and XML. You may have heard that JSON is more popular, but the truth is that the notation APIs use depends on multiple factors. You can learn more about them and decide what would be best suited for you.

What are APIs used for?

Exactly! Why should you use one? Well, the main principle behind an API is that you should not reinvent the wheel. But I am not going to convince you with words so let’s take a practical example.

When you visit pretty much any website that contains addresses (of restaurants, hotels, tourist attractions, etc.), there are big chances that you will see a map showing the location of that place. Clicking on it, you can see and use the Google Maps interface to navigate the surroundings and get directions clues.

This is because the website used Google Maps API to offer the users a better experience, all directly from their web application.

It would be a pretty silly move to implement this feature on their own. Even if they had done that, it would have been somewhat challenging to reach the same complexity level and feature quality Google Maps offers.

Instead of reinventing the wheel, they learned how to use it, integrate it into their app, and apply this saved time to focus on their business’s primary purpose.

API benefits for the consumer

If you’ve read to this point, you may have already noticed some advantages of using an API. To be honest, the real challenge would be to show you the disadvantage of using one. But for now, let’s dig in more clearly on what you stand to win by using an API.

User Experience

In the previous example, the map feature is not mandatory for the website. The developers could simply add a text input with the location and let you switch manually to Google Maps.

It may not sound that bad if you access the website from a PC or laptop, but a mobile user will lose their patience quickly. So they improved the user experience by learning how Maps API works and integrating it into their application.

Innovation

As I stated earlier, an API can spare you a lot of time from implementing a complex solution that solves a minor problem. You may encounter situations unrelated to the user experience that you can also solve by using an API.

For example, a web scraping API will take care of the challenges encountered in web scraping and offer you a complete and accurate HTML document of the website scraped. There are various use cases where you may need this.

The main idea is that replacing the painstaking process of building a web scraper with integrating an API will give you enough time and creativity to focus on your application’s main features and bring something new to the table.

API benefits for the provider

What about the other side? How can an API provider benefit from sharing their data?

Productivity

In the context of private APIs, many companies started adopting this strategy to improve employee productivity.

They can easily reach this goal by using an in-house API that minimizes paper-based management of bureaucracy and offers up-to-date information on various devices.

New business opportunities

While both models offer data to people outside the company, you have to be very clear when offering either a partner API or a public API. Data transparency is widely valued and can easily ensure new opportunities.

A partner API is the one you share only with the business partners you choose. This way, you can facilitate the data exchange and easily build trust within associates, just like using a private API on a larger scale.

Providing a public API has another wide range of benefits:

• Allowing other people to build something your company may not have time for;
• Monetizing the access and use of the API;
• Improving your company’s brand with data transparency;
• Finding more customers in small companies or developers.

How APIs are shaping the future

Humans need to communicate so they can collaborate and create better things. Software products are the same. They need to transfer data to function more efficiently, and God forbid a manual way to do this.

Luckily for us, APIs are here to solve this problem elegantly. They continuously grow in more flexible, secure, and transparent solutions, so why not join the revolution and connect your app with the rest of the world?

At this point, the huge impact of APIs is no longer speculation, but fact. If APIs are ever to fall from use, it’s because someone invented something that does an even better job of connecting software.

Check out this story if you want to gain a more detailed understanding of an API and how it works, or this one to see a practical example of how easy it is to use an API.