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Results from the Superface API Survey
Since we are building an entirely new thing in the API industry, we needed a help from our wonderful community to do it well. So, for two weeks in September 2022, we asked our global online audience to participate in our survey on how APIs are being used.
We covered areas connected with these 4 topics:
- Public API landscape
- Internal API landscape
- API development in general
- Consumption of APIs
We received 116 responses in total. Take a look at the insightful data below 💡
What is your role in the company
The majority of respondents identified as developers.
Providing public APIs
In this section, we asked about public and partner APIs provided by the company.
How many public APIs you provide?
How many consumers are using your APIs?
How do you support adoption of your public API?
The majority of respondents support their API with documentation. In some cases, respondents provide only OpenAPI specification.
Which programming languages do you support with your SDK?
The majority of respondents support NodeJS for their SDK, followed closely by Java / Kotlin, and Python.
How do you rate your public API ecosystem's DX (developer experience)?
We’ve asked respondents to rate the Developer Experience of their public API ecosystem on a range from 0 to 10. The majority ranked their DX above 5, with most respondents choosing 7.
When asked about a reason for the rating, most respondents mentioned their documentation — as being either well written, or poor and outdated. A frequent sentiment was that their DX “could be better”.
How long it takes to integrate your APIs?
The majority of respondents picked hours or days as an estimated time for integration of their APIs.
Internal APIs
In this section, we asked about the internal API landscape of respondent’s company.
Which technologies do you use for internal APIs?
The vast majority of respondents use REST internally. Async APIs (including message queues) and GraphQL are used in around quarter of cases.
How do you keep track of your internal APIs?
Majority of respondents use source code repository for keeping track of internal APIs. Two respondents mentioned use of Postman collections, we have included them under API catalog option.
How many internal APIs have more than one consumer?
About a quarter of respondents estimated that up to 30% of their internal APIs have more than one consumer.
How do you support developer experience of internal integrations?
Documentation is the most common way for supporting the DX of internal integrations. Among other responses were video tutorials and pair programming.
Do you use API federation to access multiple APIs at once?
More respondents don't use API federation.
API development
In this section, we asked how APIs are being developed in the company, both internal and external.
How do you update your APIs (both internal and external)?
The majority of respondents add or depreciate fields and endpoints on the current API version. In contrast to the minority of respondents who maintain multiple versions of their APIs.
How many versions do you maintain?
This question applied only to respondents who answered that they maintain multiple versions of their APIs. Out of these, the majority support the last 2-5 versions.
How good do you think is API versioning in your company in general?
This question also applied only to the respondents maintaining multiple API versions. On the scale of 1 to 10, most respondents marked their internal API versioning by Mark better than five. Interestingly, no respondent gave the mark of 9 or 10.
Do you have API guidelines?
Majority of respondents does have API guidelines.
Consuming APIs
In this section, we asked about the consumption of third-party APIs.
How many 3rd party APIs do you consume as a company?
According to respondents, more than half of their companies consume 10+ APIs.
How many of your services/apps use more than 1 provider for the same or very similar use-case?
In this question, we asked about use of multiple providers for similar use-cases. Per provided answers, most respondents have at least one application using more than 1 provider.
How much time in days you spend on API integrations per month?
Most respondents spend 10 or fewer days on API integrations.
Do you have a dedicated team/people for integrations?
About half of respondents have a dedicated team for integrations.
Conclusion
We are super happy to see what our community has to say. We hope these insights on the API landscape were useful for you too!
If you have any other feedback to help us improve, please share your input to our email.