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With the front end in the past, it’s time to talk about the back end of developing for the iPhone. More specifically, the API system that many websites are implementing to make developing applications for their sites easier and easier every day. Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Google Analytics, and many other sites now have them and have been using them for a while to benefit everyone.

As far as PR and popularity go, public APIs are a great way to help make a product or service even better. If you think about, how often do you even visit the Twitter site with the multitudinous amount of Twitter clients available? APIs can drive traffic and popularity to a service by providing innumerable ways of accessing the content, as well as displaying the content itself. For PR reasons, public APIs can make products more open, which is something everyone enjoys.

APIs aren’t just great for the companies, though, they are also great for end users. With powerful APIs, developers can easily leverage the power of many of today’s most popular websites and make them even greater. Furthermore, this ease of use can shorten development time, meaning money will come quicker to the developer, and consumers will get products sooner. Are you beginning to see how it’s a win-win scenario for everyone?

Now that we know APIs are great, how are they used? To begin with, most of them require that developers ask for a unique key that can be used to verify that their use of the API is different from that of other developers. These can also be used to limit use to the API based on key number. Then, developers simply need to read up on the API to find all of the information the company makes available and in what way. From there on, developers can put together products that use the information available in the way they best see fit. And as history as shown, they have taken great advantage of this.

See more iPhone Developer Intervention articles.