An application programming interface enables applications to interact with external services. Without APIs, apps’ functionalities can be limited, and the development time can increase significantly. Quite simply, if you want to develop a smarter mobile app, you need to use APIs. If you are new to using APIs for app development, check out the following helpful guide.
APIs Allow You to Create Versatile and Dynamic Apps
By adopting an API management solution in your mobile app development, you can design, publish, and manage apps that give you the agility and versatility needed for your app to become successful. APIs connect users with backend services to enable new capabilities to be built upon them. At the end of the day, APIs enable you to create a versatile and dynamic environment when developing mobile apps. The more you learn about APIs, the smarter your mobile apps will be.
APIs Enable Your Mobile App to Be Easily Accessible on Multiple Platforms
To ensure your services are easy to access, your app needs to be available on multiple platforms. By using APIs, you can ensure your services are accessible on channels that your target audience regularly frequents, such as Instagram and Facebook.
APIs Can Help Your Mobile App to Be Faster
To create responsive digital experiences, you need to build a solid foundation and invest up and down the stack. Mobile apps that are slow and unresponsive are often so due to bottlenecks on the server. Sure, you can build on your existing legacy to make your app faster, but your app will cause a poor end-user experience if it sits on top of slow APIs.
APIs Can Increase App Responsiveness
Mobile apps often need to make several service calls to complete specific transactions on a certain screen. That can be problematic because increased service calls can result in app responsiveness limitations. But by building efficient API endpoints and utilizing the local cache from the device, you can externally fill in the user experience from the API. In short, an API supports the front end to make sure there is only one API call per screen.
Employing Microservices
For a smarter mobile app, move integration points from large systems to microservices architecture. Generally, by breaking down the large system into a set of smaller independent services, deployments, isolation, and troubleshooting are easier to create, implement, and maintain. With a microservices architecture, you can produce an entirely decoupled API that is simpler to use.
Reducing Network Chatter
You can create a large API response by ensuring network chatter is reduced. It is important to limit the client-server chatter, but it is also crucial that each endpoint feedback of the API only gives away the data required by the app for the given screen. Every change you make to the backend can affect the performance of your API on the front-end app.
APIs Enable Better Unification for Collaboration
When you approach development from an API perspective, you can create various software components with more attention to their integration. And because APIs are basically sets of defined rules, applying APIs to your app development means all of the members of your development team will be on the same page. By using the same rules and formats, your mobile app code can be more transparent and streamlined.
