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
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.
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