2022 State ofAPIs
Developers’ workflows change rapidly.
Here are the insights you helped us collect on the state of APIs in 2022.
Who did we survey?
The Rapid Developer Survey received 850 responses from over 100 different countries. Many of the respondents were professional developers, with over 85% reporting that they program as part of their job or education.
Overall, the survey respondents represent a wide variety of organization sizes, experience levels, and industries.
What are our favorite languages?
We asked questions to determine what languages developers use and which ones they prefer. Although JavaScript still being the most used language, it has lost ground this year, while TypeScript has grown by 4% since 2021. Older languages’ usage continued to fall — see Java, PHP, C#, and .NET moving down.
What tools are we using?
This year, we saw an increase in the usage of all types of APIs. Webhooks, Serverless & FaaS, and REST API are being used by more and more developers. While the changes are subtle, we expect newer types of APIs will continue to grow in popularity as the technology matures.
Each colored bar indicates the change in the percentage of people in each bucket from 2021 to 2022:
increasing, sustaining, or decreasing.
—— Increasing familiarity & usage —-->
How much do we rely on APIs?
Over 62.6% of developers reported relying on APIs more in 2022 than they did in 2021. Additionally, 69.2% expect to rely on APIs even more in 2023.
How important is it to participate in the API economy?
This figure was even higher in specific industries, including telecommunications, professional, and financial services. Nearly all organizations with an active, high-priority project around APIs or microservices agreed that participation in the API economy was important.
What kinds of APIs are we using?
Internal APIs were still the most common API type that developers reported working on for their organization. However, compared to our 2021 Developer Surveys, more developers in 2022 reported working on partner-facing or third-party APIs.
The percentage of developers who reported working on partner-facing and third-party APIs was the most noticeable increase across all categories, increasing by almost 5% from 44.2 to 48.9 and 49% to 53.9%, respectively. This change was even more dramatic with partner-facing APIs in industries like Technology, which grew by nearly 10%.
Are we monetizing APIs?
Developers from industries including financial services, technology, telecommunications, and healthcare reported monetizing APIs at an above-average rate. There is also a marked increase in monetization from people who work in organizations that use over 10 APIs.
As we move into 2023, we expect even more organizations will take advantage of the API economy and monetize their APIs.
How do APIs scale with organization size?
We found the number of APIs an organization maintains grows with the size of the organization. Nearly 40% of the largest companies we surveyed reported having over 250 internal APIs. This increase mirrors our findings from 2020 and 2021.
How important is API testing?
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Thank you to everyone who participated in this year’s Rapid Developer Survey! We hope this report gives you insight into the API landscape and emerging technology trends.