Application Programming Interface

API is a set of definitions and protocols that allow technology products and services to communicate with each other via the internet. APIs are how apps talk to each other.

Imagine you are building an app like Uber, and when a user signs up, you want to check if their email is valid.

How would you do that?

There's pretty complicated logic that goes into validating an email address:

You'd check the format of string (does it have an @ sign?), you would ping the domain to make sure it runs an email server, and check a couple of blocklists to make sure it's not a delisted address.

Do you think you have time to build and maintain an email validation service like that? Especially, when it’s just you or with a small team. Wouldn’t you rather spend time improving your business than spending time on trivial things like this?

Instead, you could use an API - a 3rd party service that already implements the email validation logic, maintains it, and improves it as it’s their business to do so. You can rely on a 3rd party API to validate your users’ email IDs.

Hence we can say that APIs help developers in 4 key ways:

1. APIs increase the development speed By leveraging APIs — developers spend less time implementing trivial features and get more time to focus on their essential business. Execution speed matters.

2. APIs reduce the overall software cost When you need to implement and maintain less code (relying on APIs), your development cost goes down. It’s a classic Build vs Buy argument.

3. APIs can increase the quality of the software Using a good API can make your software better. Each API component is developed by a business primarily focused on making it the best possible solution rather than one team that has to be good at many things.

4. APIs yield new possibilities With APIs, developers can now integrate with data sets and implement features like AI and Machine Learning that they wouldn't have been able to use before, creating new business opportunities.