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Ask HN: How many API requests does the average mobile app make in a day?

by pla3rhat3r on 8/11/15, 10:36 PM with 5 comments

Sorry if this seems elementary, but it came up in conversation and I realized there's not a clear metric around this.

  • by patio11 on 8/11/15, 10:40 PM

    It depends greatly on what you're doing. For Facebook or Twitter, in typical use? Hundreds or thousands, but not hundreds of thousands.

    For, I don't know, a podcast app, it could be dozens for most users, low hundreds for power-users.

    There exist very lucrative mobile apps where the answer is likely single digits. (In addition to some which make no requests at all, of course.)

  • by pla3rhat3r on 8/11/15, 11:55 PM

    I should have been more clear. I was looking at how many API calls a typical app would make when gathering data. Is it in the hundred, thousands? On average. Or that too wide of a question to get an accurate metric?

  • by benologist on 8/11/15, 10:41 PM

    There's no clear metric because it's dependent on how many requests each individual API the app has integrated or built.

    To find out you would probably have to test a lot of apps yourself and extrapolate from that.