Edit: Thank you for all of your answers. I feel I have a much better understanding of what’s going on. Hope to see y’all on the other side of this.
In: 241
Let’s use Twitter as an example. Twitter has different functionality such as allowing you to see tweets, post tweets, like tweets, etc.
You use Twitter through the browser and have a visual interface but Twitter also allows this functionality to be used through APIs. An API is a way for a third party system to talk to another system (like Twitter). So I can write a software that will make these API calls to Twitter and do all the functionality machine to machine. So I could do an API request to Twitter to get all tweets mentioning tornados in Iowa because I’m making a weather app for example. This can be a large amount of data processing for Twitter to handle this type of request so Twitter might not want to do it for free because it costs them money so they sell access to their API.
Companies have products that they offer say Reddit.
An API (Application Programming Interface) is a guided way that app developers allow different developers and companies to interact with their product.
Say I want to make a bot that makes a Reddit post every 5 minutes. I could do this through web parsing and the like, but it could get difficult depending on how the website is laid out. Or I can use the Reddit API which streamlined the process, as long as I follow their guidelines. (Say rather than using multiple libraries and tens of lines of code, I import the Reddit library and call the function (createPost or whatever it’s called.)
For an API subscription, I’m assuming you’re referring to Twitter API (please correct me if I’m wrong,) every time a developer calls the API the company knows and tracks their call count /frequency. Most grant free access as long as you don’t abuse the API, others require you to pay for X calls or X calls/second.
There’s also the subscription where you subscribe to be notified of an event, but I’m not sure if this is what you meant.
I think the best place to start is explaining what an API is. An API is an Application Programming Interface. An application is a program with a purpose. An interface in this sense is an interface between two programs or services.
Put more simply, an API is a way for a program to gain access to something another program has, commonly data.
Let’s look at the Weather app on your iPhone. Apple doesn’t have the tools to take measurements and predict forecasts across the world, but they want to design a weather app to show their users the weather. Let’s call whatever company Apple gets their data from WeatherCo™.
WeatherCo™ stores all their measurements in a database. WeatherCo wants to share this data with others, but they don’t want to just give free access to their database for security reasons primarily, but it also allows monetization. They write a program that allows other companies like Apple to access the database while still retaining control of their own database. This would be the API.
WeatherCo™ would then charge Apple to use this API. Apple would have an API Key(s) that acts like something between a password and an ID. A key would be required to make the API actually give you data, and each time Apple got data from the API (an API request), it would be recorded to know how much they were using the API. Costs are usually determined by how many requests you make, as the more requests you make, the more it will cost to run the server.
In the situation with Apollo, which I’m assuming you are referring to, the Reddit API is the program that Apollo goes through that allows users to browse, post, message, etc. on Reddit through an app that isn’t developed by Reddit.
There are computers on the internet that have interesting data – weather, news, stocks, sports, tweets, etc. If I want to write an app for your iPhone that displays weather information, I need a way for the app to get weather data. So I pay Apple or another company money for that data. Typically they charge a certain amount per request – starting at $50/month for a million calls via Apple.
My software uses the device’s gps to get the location and then connects to Apple’s weather server for the conditions or forecast.
You use your browser to access websites and to make actions on it. As an human this is fine, even if the page (styles or data) keep changing, you can figure everything out. A computer can’t without somebody else updating it again and again.
With nowday internet, a website can change a lot in a small maner of time. Important events, just because branding is important, laws, or even some other silly thing like ads that may change the user experience with more invasive experience from time to time.
An API is a backdoor to allow softwares to do the same thing in a way that barely change (and without ads, popup, …)
Sometime API are used to automate stuffs (like those bot you can see here and there on reddit).
Sometime, peoples are making tools to “extend” the original service.
Like, let said reddit is used by influent peoples, maybe you don’t want them to post without someone from the public relation department taking a look at it. So I may create a website where the influent people would post. Then a public relation guy would approve it and I would submit the post to reddit via the API.
(May not be the best user experience here since you shouldn’t post using the official mean and my “app” only handle posting and don’t let you browse reddit)
An API is a bridge between two lands.
You live on one side of the bridge, and the store is on the other side of the bridge.
Every day you need to go to the store, but in an attempt to control the amount of traffic on the bridge, the owner of the bridge decides to charge a toll.
Without that bridge, there’s no way to get food, so you pay the toll.
It’s when computers talk to each other by calling a 1-900 number.
APIs are the phone lines and languages the computers use. The 900 number is the billable medium for their communication. That’s the short answer.
The longer answers are covered elsewhere already, but I’m trying to give the ELI5-level answer.
Like you are actually 5:
It is like a post office. The API is the mail person taking your mail and the subscription is the postage fee.
It’s the “front desk” to another application and the subscription is how much their service costs.
Christmas is coming up and your Mom instructs you to go through the toy catalog and circle the stuff you want. But your Mom can’t just hand the catalog to Santa. He’s not going to go through it and finds your circled stuff. So your Mom does that part and converts it into a written list that Santa can easily understand and process. She mails it off to him a month before Christmas. A month later, some assembled toys show up under the tree because Santa came back with a fulfilled list. Your Mom spent the night building your Legos and Easy Bake Oven and other stuff so that it looks and works like the picture that you expected.
Your Mom is the API. She converted what you’re looking for in terms that you understand (pictures in a catalog) into a form that Santa understands (a list). She then helped convert what Santa delivered (packaged toys) into the things you were expecting (the complete toys that look like the pictures from the catalog).
Non API people have to wait in line at the store to get their stuff.
API people have paper forms that they can fill out and fax in to get their stuff delivered.
An API subscription gets you
1) the fax number (access to the API)
2) a limited number of paper forms to fax in – more forms cost more money. Sometimes it is unlimited requests and your subscription gets you unlimited papar forms. Most paid APIs have some sort of upper limit.
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