Sometimes I’m tempted to build an application based on a 3rd party api.
After a few moments of what I can only call madness though, I come back to my senses.
We see too often stories about big companies shutting down their apis to third party developers as soon as they’ve reached a point when they don’t need the little guys so much anymore. We’ve seen it with (almost) every single platform that had some sort of open api.
Twitter is notorious for this. Forcing application on an arbitrary 100k user upper limit. And furthermore limit what 3rd party apps can do compared to the official app. Google is simply shutting products and apis instead, but they also from time to time decide to shut down support for 3rd parties, as it happened for example with the nest apis. On top of that Google is forcing Gmail extensions to go through an extensive approval process costing up to 75k usde for each app. All indipendent developers that depend on it for a living will have their income crippled.
If you can, avoid building any app based on third party APIs that you have no control over.