The State of Public APIs 2023

#api #security #performance #designpatterns

tl;dr we (Escape) scanned 6056+ public APIs on the internet with our in-house feedback driven exploration tech and ranked them using security, performance, reliability, and design criteria. We decided to analyze the resulting data and produce a full featured report: The State of Public APIs 2023

Why build this report? 🤔

Two weeks ago, we released apirank.dev, the result of extensive research on public APIs on the internet, conducted at an unprecedented scale using our feedback-driven API exploration technology. You can read more about this in our original APIRank post.

But we quickly realized that the data we gathered for ranking APIs could also be used to establish a benchmark of the current state of Public APIs in the wild.

Thus, we compiled this dataset into a full-featured report that analyzes the performance, reliability, design, and security of the APIs we scanned.

To our knowledge, this is one of the first of its kind study about the quality of APIs, mostly because of its scale and the depth of the data we gathered.

What are the properties we analyzed? 🎯

Since the data we used for creating the report comes from APIRank.dev, we used similar properties to those in our original study:

Security
Performance
Reliability
Design
Popularity

Results 🏅

The full results can be found on The State of Public APIs 2023

We discovered that while public APIs are getting more and more documented, significant improvement in the industry can still be made regarding documentation quality, response reliability, and especially security.

We hope to see more studies of this kind to be conducted to observe how those tendencies evolve in the future.