There are now a number of backend-as-a-service companies focused on mobile developers. We list 6 backend APIs that help with common mobile tasks, including the Cocoafish API, which was today acquired by Appcelerator. But it’s a much bigger ecosystem, as shown in the infographic below.
Amazon just dropped prices on its popular Amazon S3 API, which provides storage to much of the web. The service will pass 1 trillion objects stored this year. With that volume comes opportunities to lower the costs, as we’ve seen from other companies whose entire product line includes APIs.
Pusher has established itself as a leading service for delivering WebSocket messages to connected clients via its simple, RESTful Pusher API. This especially suits application developers working with languages and platforms that struggle to maintain and scale persistent connections. We remove the need to roll a custom solution and work with complex and unfamiliar technologies, and ensure the benefits of a hosted service can be achieved. We’ve recently added support for WebHooks, which provide a different sort of real-time solution.
Roll-your-own API service Usergrid has been acquired by API management company Apigee. Usergrid could potentially help Apigee reach out to mobile developers increasingly finding themselves needing APIs to interact with their apps. It’s part of a trend of developers not only being API consumers, but also API providers–at least privately to their own apps.
Heroku is at the end of its first full year as part of Salesforce.com. During that year, the number of applications running on the platform has grown eight fold to over 800,000. Byron Sebastian, Heroku’s CEO, said that much of this growth has come from an increasing presence of enterprise customers, many of whom are new to the API-driven Platform-as-a-Service offering that Heroku offers.
The company tracking cloud spending will now let you spend money on its service. Cloudability believes that with more businesses are moving to the cloud, monitoring the costs is becoming important. Now it’s put a price on that importance, including a free plan that will track up to $2,500 per month on more than 80 services, including AWS platforms like Amazon EC2. Of course, there’s a Cloudability API so you can get at your data however you want.
After Facebook announced that apps can be deployed to Heroku, the cloud platform saw tremendous growth. It’s on pace to add five times as many applications in 2011 as it had last year, likely fueled by being the only cloud service supported from within Facebook. The two companies introduced a new concept in developer relations, the “click-to-cloud” sample app.
Box.Net is on a mission to increase adoption of its file storage service with consumers. After successful adoption of its service with enterprise customers, it is clearly determined to woo mobile device owners by providing them with large amounts of free space (50GB!). To make it easier, it is partnering with device manufacturers like LG to provide the free space seamlessly via the Box.net API.
Back in May I wrote about the race for either unified APIs or API standards to bridge the growing number of APIs in specific industries or areas. Unified APIs are created by a third party provider to bridge multiple APIs, while API standards would potentially create an industry-wide standard of how APIs should operate.
Sometimes the API world can get a little meta. Cloudability is a startup focused solely on helping companies determine how much they’re spending in the cloud. Now the company is entering public beta, which includes launching its Cloudability API. That makes the service another API for APIs.
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