I've noticed that the bulk of my time as a software developer these days is spent reverse engineering third-party REST APIs that don't already have a publicly available API client or publicly available API specification (e.g. OpenAPI).
Why don't more companies publish either a specification for their API or an API client on a website like GitHub?
For small shops with a few engineers, this makes sense, but for companies that we're paying > $100,000/yr. for access to their APIs, it seems like they should also provide an API client for interacting with it - or at the very least, API documentation.
What are the main barriers preventing more companies from releasing either a specification for their APIs or an API client?
Are APIs easier to reverse engineer these days, and therefore it's not really necessary to release a client or specification?
On the other hand, maybe writing a full-fledged API client is an anti-pattern, since callers could simply implement the functionality that they need rather than implementing all of the functionality that they think that they MIGHT need while still reverse engineering the API?
Why don't more companies publish either a specification for their API or an API client on a website like GitHub?
For small shops with a few engineers, this makes sense, but for companies that we're paying > $100,000/yr. for access to their APIs, it seems like they should also provide an API client for interacting with it - or at the very least, API documentation.
What are the main barriers preventing more companies from releasing either a specification for their APIs or an API client?
Are APIs easier to reverse engineer these days, and therefore it's not really necessary to release a client or specification?
On the other hand, maybe writing a full-fledged API client is an anti-pattern, since callers could simply implement the functionality that they need rather than implementing all of the functionality that they think that they MIGHT need while still reverse engineering the API?