

Ask HN: How many API requests does the average mobile app make in a day? - pla3rhat3r

Sorry if this seems elementary, but it came up in conversation and I realized there&#x27;s not a clear metric around this.
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patio11
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.)

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pla3rhat3r
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?

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dennybritz
It's too wide of a question because of several reasons:

1\. What do you count as an API request? Do you mean requests to "external"
APIs? Or do you mean requesting content from the actual app server (e.g.
Facebook loading timeline content)? Which API requests are you interested in?

2\. What is a "typical app"? A game? A news reader? Twitter?

Even if someone could give you an answer that answer would most likely be
irrelevant. API requests are a design choice. You can build the same app
making 100 requests or 1 request for the same content. Both have tradeoffs.

Obviously it also depends on how much the user uses the app.

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pla3rhat3r
Thanks for the feed back Denny.

1\. In this case an API request would be GET and POST of data.

2\. I'm looking for a range here. And this is just gathering data from an app.
So on the high end think Candy Crush. On the low end, your everyday lower tier
app.

I recognize the API design is a choice, but in this case I'm looking to find
out how many API requests would typically be made to gather data for the most
popular app vs. an everyday run of the mill app.

Thanks again!

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benologist
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.

