Rapid, the leading API hub provider that enables developers and enterprises to build, consume, and manage APIs, today released its 4th annual State of APIs Report, which highlights trends in software development and API usage. The report comprised insights from 850 individuals, including professional developers, and identified key trends on how the API economy is growing at a record pace, with 63% of developers relying more on APIs in 2022 than in the previous year. It also pointed out that the telecommunications, technology, and financial services sectors expect to utilise more APIs in 2023.
Iddo Gino, CEO and founder, Rapid
"This year's report reaffirms that the market has shifted to where businesses focused on digital transformation now need to be API businesses in order to thrive," said Iddo Gino, CEO and founder, Rapid. "Many organisations rely on their developers for technologies that will help them stay competitive in today's economy, and in turn the developers are increasingly leveraging APIs for speed and operational efficiency."
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APIs make it easy to adjust, transform, enrich and consume data and more than 75% of developers are prioritising participating in the API economy or plan to prioritise it soon.
Key findings include:
- API economy surging: Approximately 70% of respondents expected to use even more APIs in 2023 than last year. The number of APIs grows with an organisation's size: nearly 40% of the largest companies - those with 10,000+ employees - have more than 250 internal APIs. In comparison, 64% of the smallest companies (1- 50 employees) use up to 10 internal APIs. Developers place more importance on APIs when they work in telecommunications (72%, up from 59% in 2021), technology (64%, up from 61% in 2021), and professional services (60%, up from 53% in 2021).
- Popularity in partner-facing and third-party APIs: while internal APIs remain the most common API type for developers (75%), more developers are working on partner-facing APIs (49%, up from 44% in 2021) or third-party APIs (54%, up from 49% in 2021). Partner-facing APIs grew nearly 10% in the technology industry.
- API monetisation is on the rise: the number of organisations monetising APIs in 2022 is up around 5% from previous years. API monetisation is up 16% in the financial sector.
- API testing continues to be a top priority: more than 90% of developers are testing or plan to test their APIs, especially those in the financial services and telecommunications industries.
- TypeScript supersedes PHP: more developers chose TypeScript (16%) to build APIs than PHP (14%) in 2022: Typescript (superset of JavaScript and the fastest growing language for developers), is now the 4th most popular language. JavaScript is the most popular, then Python; Java; TypeScript; and PHP in that order.
For more information
- The full Rapid State of API Developer Survey 2022
- CEO and founder Iddo Gino's headshot and other visuals supporting the announcement can be found here
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