9 Most popular and useful APIs for Mobile Application Development

API stands for “Application Program Interface.” It is used as an intermediary between two software/applications to exchange data or communicate with each other. Recently API-approach is in-trend in mobile application development.

Here is the list of some of the useful APIs for Mobile Application Development:

Facebook API: It is most popular and most often used API by mobile developers.  The API allows applications to utilize the social connections and profile information to make applications more connecting and to put out activities to the news feed and profile pages of Facebook, based on individual user privacy settings. With the API, users can add social information in their applications by using profile, friends list, Page, group, photo, and event data. The API uses RESTful protocol and responses are in JSON format. Facebook has split its API into Facebook Ad, Facebook Atlas, Facebook Graph and Facebook Marketing.

Twitter API: This is also used by many mobile developers all around the world to recognize their users on sign up and to allow users to post content simply from an app to their Twitter account. If you’re making an application where data is shared on social media platforms like Twitter or Facebook on your app’s behalf, be attentive that spamming ore related actions can lead to retracted access for these APIs.

LinkedIn’s API:  A widespread interface is well known as a networking site for business professionals, the impact of it would be certainly different than above discussed social media platform APIs.

Google Maps API: One of the massively popular APIs that enables mapping and location tracking services in third-party applications. Unlike social APIs, Google APIs are not available free of charge, instead, you need to pay a fee for your application. Even there are some restrictions related to a number of queries raised in 24 hours period. As Google Map’s service has been split into multiple APIs – Static Maps API, Street View Image API, Directions API, Distance Matrix APIs etc, the user can opt for the specific API based on the requirement of the application and can save the cost.

YouTube API: This allows users to access plentiful of video content. Select from the data or players API to embed kinds of players or include Youtube search capabilities. This can bring Youtube experience to your application and add life your products or services.

Gmail API: Integrating this API facilitates user to login to your app using his Gmail account and he need not open a new account with the app, this saves time and the user can quickly access the landing page. This is really useful as many users avoid opening new accounts, just for the sake of exploring the new app.

AccuWeather: This or any other weather API offers access to current weather data of any location on the Earth and has wide outreach to more than 200,000 cities. Plenty of weather stations contribute to providing up-to-date weather data.

Instagram API: The most popular photo sharing app provides service of API which can be used to access user authentication, friend connections, photos, latest updates and uploads of the user etc.

Flickr: This API provides developers with the ability to apply this dazzling online photo management and sharing service. With this API, it is possible to view, manipulate, and use various features related to Flickr.

In short, APIs permits apps to interact with each other. They can enhance the user experience and might even help accelerate the acceptance of your app, resulting in building online popularity.