Imagine you’re at a restaurant. You don’t walk into the kitchen and cook your own meal. Instead, you tell the waiter what you want, the waiter takes your request to the kitchen, and then brings back your food. An API (Application Programming Interface) works exactly like that waiter.
APIs allow different software applications to talk to each other without you seeing what happens behind the scenes. When you use a weather app on your phone, it’s not generating the forecast itself. Instead, it sends a request through an API to a weather service’s server, which sends back the current conditions and forecast data. The app then displays that information in a user-friendly way.
This happens constantly in our digital lives. When you log into a website using your Google account, that’s an API at work. When a travel site compares prices across multiple airlines, APIs are fetching that data in real time. APIs make our digital world connected and functional, allowing developers to build on existing services rather than reinventing the wheel every time. They’re the invisible infrastructure that makes modern software so powerful and interconnected.