2022 State of the API Report

When it comes to the number of hours a week developers are spending with APIs, the figures for 2022 mirrored last year's. When we drill down deeper into the numbers, we see that certain roles spend far more hours than others. Over 40% of backend developers devote more than 20 hours a week on APIs, the highest percentage in the survey.

We asked individuals how they spend their time working with APIs today, and how they'd ideally like to allocate that time. The biggest portion of their API time–almost a third–is now spent coding and programming, which matched their ideal state.

The second-biggest portion of their API time is spent debugging and manual testing. It's a sometimes tedious task, and respondents wished they could cut the amount of time spent here by a third.

Interestingly, API-first leaders spend less time on this chore. While the average respondents devoted 15% of their API time to debugging and manual testing, API-first leaders dedicated just 13%. Those who were the least API-first spent the most time, at 17%.

For the first time, a majority of respondents (51%) said most of their organization's development effort was spent working with APIs. That's up from 49% last year and 40% in 2020. This milestone in development comes as more companies employ APIs for internal and external products and services.

Respondents from organizations with more than 500 developers were most common, at 25%; however, the next largest category—those with fewer than 10 developers—accounted for 21% of respondents. These figures largely line up with last year's survey.