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Unofficial APIs

github.com

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Re: Unofficial APIs

#51

Post by itzael »

dhruvkar wrote: post #3

Awesome! I tried writing a CLI tool for ordering Chipotle, but I ran into some dynamically generated headers, that made it near impossible to authenticate. In the end, I gave up. Would love to see more examples and see how issues like this can be handled!

I’ve had this come up a few times when doing API snooping, and what I’ve done is decompiling the Android version (if available) of their app using jadx [1]. You get pretty legible Java, sometimes with Kotlin artifacts, sometimes with obfuscation, but in combination with some MITM snooping you can see how auth/headers/hashes are done. Sometimes you even find internal API endpoints with a security issue or two.

[1]: https://github.com/skylot/jadx

Re: Unofficial APIs

#52

Post by thephyber »

Alupis wrote: post #47

Strange they list Coinbase as an "Unofficial API". The trading API is very much so official, and dates back to the GDAX days.

I think you misunderstand what this repo calls an "API".

The Coinbase "API" in this repo isn't the protocol (eg an HTTP REST API implementation), but the 3rd party Python library which speaks the protocol[1].

[1] https://github.com/danpaquin/coinbasepro-python

Re: Unofficial APIs

#53

Post by volkk »

minimaxir wrote: post #19

From a practicality standpoint, I strongly discourage using unofficial APIs, as tech companies nowadays are very prone to sending out C&Ds. If you have a use case where the official API doesn't suffice, then do not redistribute anything obtained from the unofficial API, and definitely do not attempt to commercialize it.

i sort of agree here. it would really suck to build something you love/proud of and maybe instead of getting a C&D, it simply changes or gets shut off and your project is dead. Rather put my efforts into something that I know will have more of a chance of surviving. at the same time i totally get if someone has an itch they just want to scratch on a weekend at the same time

Re: Unofficial APIs

#54

Post by charlieegan3 »

cschneid wrote: post #2

Awesome! I was just looking at integrating Omnifocus and Notion to keep better notes and history of tasks, letting Omnifocus focus on just the task management side of the world. It'd be cool to link up a script that takes a new task in Omnifocus under the right tag, and push a template into Notion for the note taking, and sync a link back into the notes field of Omnifocus for quick access.

Notion plan to release an API soon. They included in their pricing plan update yesterday.

Re: Unofficial APIs

#55

Post by charlieegan3 »

Personally I’ve found using ‘private’ web APIs to be a bit of a mixed blessing. Having side projects break with no notice is very frustrating, at the same time they’re a huge improvement on scraping for ad-hoc tasks.

Re: Unofficial APIs

#56

Post by odensc »

pokemapper wrote: post #34
komali2 wrote: post #10

Haha the pokemonGo Api! I was in the final stages of a bootcamp right when Pokemon Go came out, and a bunch of us were desperately trying to put ourselves on the map by doing something lit with Pokemon Go. We discovered that the spawns were cycled hourly, so if we could gather enough data we could quite accurately map out every pokemon in the city. Then we came up against not knowing anything about parsing the data w…

I got another fun story from the other side. I worked at one of the few small companies that provided free Openstreetmap-powered basemaps at the time: you could just grab our map tile URL, plug it into Leaflet or any other mapping lib, and get a instant basemap with OSM data, provided you gave credit to us and under some not really restrictive ToS. In fact you probably used us at the time. The technology behind those…

Mapzen? :)

Re: Unofficial APIs

#57

Post by Alupis »

thephyber wrote: post #52
Alupis wrote: post #47

Strange they list Coinbase as an "Unofficial API". The trading API is very much so official, and dates back to the GDAX days.

I think you misunderstand what this repo calls an "API". The Coinbase "API" in this repo isn't the protocol (eg an HTTP REST API implementation), but the 3rd party Python library which speaks the protocol[1]. [1] https://github.com/danpaquin/coinbasepro-python

I must be lost then.

The python code is an implementation of a program that uses the Coinbase API to make trades, fetch market data, etc.

In my day, we'd call that a Program, Library or an SDK. Definitely wouldn't call that an "Unofficial API".

When I think of "Unofficial API", I think of an API that wasn't intended for public use and is undocumented and supported by the company. Like the Pandora API some music players have reversed... or the Pokemon GO API people are talking about in this very thread.

Coinbase released, documented and supports their API. Anything that uses that API to do things is just a program, or library.

Re: Unofficial APIs

#58

Post by dastx »

xur17 wrote: post #28

Tangentially related, but I've been working on something for merchant websites (Amazon, Target, Walmart, etc) that you can feed a product url, and get back product information (image, title, price, availability, etc). It takes ~10 lines of code to write a driver for a merchant, and they are fairly stable if written properly. My goal is to open source this, and allow anyone to contribute new / update existing drivers.…

Please do. I'm tired of going to multiple sites to compare prices.

Re: Unofficial APIs

#59

Post by me551ah »

I love the tinder API. A few years ago I was planing to shift to another locality in my city but couldn't figure out where. I eventually decided to move to an area with the best looking women. Used the python tinder API to move around the whole city with GPS coordinates while setting the shortest possible radius and saved profile pictures tagging them with geo location. The end result was a database of geolocation mapped to profile pictures of women in that area.

Re: Unofficial APIs

#60

Post by varenc »

komali2 wrote: post #10

Haha the pokemonGo Api! I was in the final stages of a bootcamp right when Pokemon Go came out, and a bunch of us were desperately trying to put ourselves on the map by doing something lit with Pokemon Go. We discovered that the spawns were cycled hourly, so if we could gather enough data we could quite accurately map out every pokemon in the city. Then we came up against not knowing anything about parsing the data w…

Was the site you remember instapokego.com per chance? :-)

It's down now but here's the archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20170308154111/www.instapokego.c...

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