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.
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API stands for Application Programming Interface. What is an interface? It’s something that allows communication between two things. Your phone screen is an interface between you and your phone.
An API is an interface between an app and some outside piece of code. It allows programmers to access data from the app with code and use it for their own projects. For example, if I’m creating a music listening app, one feature I might want to add is to let people import songs straight from their SoundCloud account. In order to do that, I’d have to use the SoundCloud API to get data about the songs from the SoundCloud app.
The way most API’s work is the company who makes the app sets up a specific URL that programmers can send requests to over the internet. The app then responds to any requests it receives as long as they’re valid.
Many API’s are totally free to use; this can be a good choice as a company if you want to encourage programmers to integrate their apps with yours. However, some API’s require a subscription to use, just like you’d pay a subscription for Netflix or some other service. This is often the case when the API is providing some kind of service to programmers like hosting files or running computations, (for example, the ChatGPT API provides the service of running an AI model) rather than just access to data.
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