From startups to large enterprises, most companies understand the need to create APIs around their products and services to drive adoption, improve integration and generate an ecosystem around them. But one would be mistaken to believe that APIs are means to an end rather than just the first stepping-stone in your enterprise mobility journey.
Supplementary to your APIs, developers need the following components to successfully build apps:
- Good Documentation: Static documentation may prove difficult to navigate and absorb. To drive API adoption, you need to offer dynamic documentation to encourage developers’ adoption.
- Sample Code: This will show them the in and out of what your APIs have to offer. It will not only accelerate their app building effort but will also unleash their creativity.
- App Templates: Time is a precious commodity to a developer. App templates provide them with the perfect framework they need to accelerate development of apps that consume your APIs. They can quickly download and run the app template see how the APIs are meant to be used, tweak it and integrate it into their project.
- SDKs: SDKs on top of APIs allow for rapid app development by providing the right tools to developers and thus, accelerating and facilitating their work on the client-side.
- Facilitate API Orchestration: More often than not, enterprises need apps requiring the orchestration of multiple APIs. These potential interconnections with other APIs should be planned for in secure and efficient manners.
- Business Logic: Additional business logic might be needed on top of your APIs for mobile optimization or adding app-specific features that do not exist in your source APIs.
- Security: Always make sure your APIs are secure and don’t expose your internal infrastructure. Special considerations may be given to your APIs for mobile app consumption.
- Conversion Formats: To open your APIs to a larger audience, conversation to different formats such as SOAP to REST might be required for mobile optimization.
To conclude, APIs provide a nice way to expose backend systems to your audience. However, mobile app developers require methods to consume those APIs efficiently and securely, ideally with tools to accelerate and facilitate user interface development.
To learn more about how AnyPresence can help empower your developer ecosystem to adopt APIs for modern mobile apps, you can watch our recent webinar with Michael Facemire of Forrester Research.