doku.pub_swipe-to-unlock-the-primer-on-technology-and-business-strategy-mehta-agashe-detroja

Uber uses the Google Maps API to draw a map of your area and predict your
car’s travel time. Source: Uber on Android
Google lets you include a small snippet of code in your app to draw a Google
Map, and it provides other snippets of code to let you draw on the maps,
calculate driving directions between points on the map, and even find out the
speed limit for a particular road. All of these tools are cheap or even free. [168]
These tools are big win for developers; they can use the technology that has
taken Google years to perfect with just a small amount of code. There’s no
need to reinvent the wheel!
These snippets of code that let you borrow another app’s functionality or data
are called APIs, or application programming interfaces. In short, APIs let
apps talk to each other. There are three main kinds of APIs.
The first kind of API lets one app ask another specialized app to solve a