Looking for Branch’s documentation for APIs? Find it here.
If you’ve ever checked the weather or sent an instant message on your phone, you’ve probably interacted with an API. API, short for Application Programming Interface, is a software intermediary that allows two applications to talk to each other. Let’s go through an example — say you want to check the weather on your phone, so you open the weather app. The app checks for your device’s location (or the location you specify) and makes a request to the app’s server. The server then retrieves weather information relevant to your location and processes it into a format that your app can understand. All of this information exchange happens through an API.
The difference between SDKs and APIs
While an API is the library/service definition and/or documentation, an SDK is a software development kit, usually a client-side library that facilitates usages of an API. As such, all SDKs are, or contain, APIs, but not all APIs are SDKs.
As an example, the JDK (Java Development Kit) contains the API as well as the compilers, runtimes, and other miscellaneous tools. As explored on StackExchange, the Java API is simply all the libraries that make up the core language that you can work with out of the box.