Photo aggregation service Trove recently ran a survey on Hacker News which polled developers about which APIs were the hardest to integrate into their projects. Facebook ranked worst with 19 percent of developers saying it had too many bugs, poor documentation, too many changes and slow response times. Google’s APIs ranked second worst with 10 percent of the vote, and Twitter came in third with 5 percent of the vote.
In its write-up, Trove commented that these APIs are “not serving their developers well. There’s bad documentation. There are problems with services like OAuth. APIs randomly change without warning. And there’s nothing even resembling industry standards, just best practices that everyone finds a way around. As developers, we build our livelihoods on these APIs, and we deserve better.”
