Yeah, you heard it right. Never fully trust a third-party API with your applications. You guys may have seen a post I shared in the recent days about one of my applications called Breaking Bad that lists the characters of the series Breaking Bad. I built that application 2 years ago using the API breakingbadapi.com, and now the API service has actually stopped, causing my application to crash.
That’s why if any of the main features of your application entirely depend on any third-party API, in the long run, it’s not a good idea to continue with that.
If you really want to use a third-party API, then surely implement a backup plan that can support the API if it goes down.
There are other reasons as well for not trusting a third-party API:
There will be updates in the API, and there is a high chance that the response JSON format can also change.
If it’s a commercial API, then there is a chance that they increase their API pricing on a yearly basis, which could increase the expenses for the application.
If the API is directly integrated into a main feature of your application and unfortunately, the API service goes down, then it’s your worst day for sure.
Just listed some of the circumstances that you may face if you 100% depend on a third-party API, so what you can do is surely implement a backup plan and add another API that also provides a similar kind of service. If the main API fails to fetch the data, then it should retrieve the data from the secondary API (for sure, it will increase the expenses for the application).
So, that’s it.