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
It’s a means of requesting data from a source that usually someone else owns. So you could send a request to the Reddit API for example and ask it to return a list of the last 100 posts to a given subreddit. The data will be formatted in a standard way that makes it easy to parse and work with.
An API is like a website that computer programs access. In the case of twitter, you had the public site that everyone uses a browser to get to, and you had the API site that programs access. In a recent college class, I wrote a computer program that connected to twitter’s api and downloaded several years worth of content from a producer called ‘weratedogs’. I analyzed that data to look for patterns. Now, I could have clicked through every post that ‘weratedogs’ posted, but that would take forever. I can make a program do it in like 2 minutes via API access.
An API subscription is a fee you pay to access such an API. APIs aren’t free to the provider, they have to pay for the internet, the internal infrastructure, the employees who work on it, increasingly disastrous cloud computing bills, etc, And since you can’t run advertising on it like you do with web content, you need to charge for access so you don’t lose money.
Pretend that you own a bakery. A customer might call in and say “I want 12 chocolate chip cookies” or they might say “I want a vanilla birthday cake with my daughter’s name and age on it”. There are a lot of different things that they could order, and different orders might require different pieces of information from the customer.
An API is like a listing of all of the different things that you can order, along with all of the required information and options that go along with each kind of order. So an API for your bakery might look like:
Chocolate Chip Cookies:
– specify the number of cookies you want.
Birthday Cake:
– specify the flavor of the cake, the flavor of the frosting, and the message you want written on the top of the cake. Optionally, you can specify the age of the person and we will put that many candles on top of the cake.
So this is an API that ensures that both sides can communicate and know what is required of them, and what they can expect from the other side when they are doing business with each other.
The big difference here is that a real world API is meant for computers to do business with each other, not really for people, and instead of doing business 1 request at a time computers tend to do a lot of requests really fast. So instead of the customer paying the bakery per order, they would work out a deal where they can place some number of orders every month and pay for it all together. That is an API subscription.
Think of an API as the language you use to talk to a computer. You may want to ask it for information (eg. search for something) or you may want to give it something (eg. upload photos).
Some computers let you talk to them for free. Others require you to pay (eg. via subscription) before they’ll listen to you. Sometimes it’s a mix of free and paid for different parts of the API.
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ELI5 answer:
API is how programs communicate together. API is in computers world something like “we set up an an office on XY street, here are forms you have to fill if you want something and here is what we will send you back. And include this secret code, so that we know it’s you”
API subscription is that one company let other company applications to communicate with each other (sometimes for free, sometimes in exchange for some money).
In the case you are probably referring to, Twitter asked large sum of cash to allow Apollo application to talk to Twitter programs running on their servers
You want to read a book that you don’t own. Your local bookstore has it, and is willing to let you use it, but wants you to pay them for access to their catalogue. You are the client, the bookstore is the server, and the front desk where you make the request and get the book is the API. Some services don’t actually charge anything, but pretty much everyone will, at some point, ask you to pay for their services.
An actual API example is, say I wanted to make an app that automatically reads out the tweets of the people I’m following on Twitter each morning. That means that the app that I make needs to ask Twitter for specific data every day. Just like a real person going to the front desk of a bookstore to rent a book, my app needs to use an API to get data from Twitter. The concept is actually pretty straightforward. If I’m a company with data that other people will want to use, I need to create an API/front desk, and design it in a way that it’s straightforward for potential clients to use
First I’ll define an API. In basic terms an API is a connection something on the internet. They’re pretty much like hidden urls on a website that return information instead of a page.
There are a few types: Get, Post, Put, and Delete.
Get is for, you guessed it, getting data. I.e. you open the reddit homepage and a get request is made for a list of posts to show on the homepage. You click on a post and another Get request is made to get the description and comments of that specific post.
Post is for creating ‘something’. It could be a post (coincidentally) or a comment, or a new account.
Put is usually used for updating things, i.e. maybe editing a post or comment.
Delete is again you guessed it, for deleting something.
Tens to Hundreds of APIs are created when you visit any website and you can see all of them by opening the network tab in your browser (I won’t go into that).
On the topic of subscriptions. Some websites will have APIs specifically for other developers to use and will charge a subscription to use them. They’ll allow you to do special things such as train an AI or create Twitter bots to post for you. Or as others have mentioned the weather provider might charge a subscription for apple to use their data in their widget.
At its simplest, an API is talking to a website.
For example, asking Reddit what posts are currently recommended (when not using reddit.com) involves making a request (asking) the Reddit API what posts are recommended for this user. If the request is valid, the Reddit API will return (answer) with a list of posts. This is currently free, and you can ask as many things as you want (up to 60 times per minute).
When API’s aren’t free, the website will ask for a unique key that’s linked to your account in the API request so they can bill you. They will keep track of how many times you ask the API something and charge costs accordingly, or they will use a subscription model where you have X amount of API requests per month/day.
None of these explanations are ELI5.
Essentially, an API is how you access the backend of some service that the developers have opened up for anyone to use.
So if I have a weather website, I could provide an API which means someone could build a weather app use pull data from my site for the app to use and present.
APIs are just hooks into the backend system so that we can use and access their system/data through their own application.
This is what happened with the Apollo App. The guy made his own app, and used the Reddit API to get all the information from Reddit. Now they are charging huge amounts for it.
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