2025 API Trend Reports: Avoid the Antipattern
Every year around this time, the steady drip of year-end trend articles starts up again. Sometimes, I get good insights from reading them — new ways of pulling together threads to weave a meaningful story about where we’ve been and where we’re going.
This year, what really struck me is how familiar the lists of so-called trends appear. Here’s a sampling of a list that probably feels all too familiar:
- Greater efficiency is a top goal, no matter the economy.
- Organizations that prioritize collaboration get better results. (We keep saying it, but are we actually doing it?)
- Keeping pace with security threats requires diligence and constant adaptation.
- New technologies (hello, AI) threaten to disrupt the status quo, and teams need to be thoughtful in how they use them.
The fact is that business fundamentals are consistent over time because they’re fundamentals. Efficiency, adaptation, collaboration and security are here to stay, API industry or not. Exactly how to achieve these goals will vary over time, but the continuity is striking. That may leave you saying to yourself (as I did for a minute too), “What’s the point?”
After all, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. We really can’t keep trying the same few things mentioned above. It just won’t do any longer.
But we can and should change our mindset as we approach these constants. Every year gives us another opportunity to make new progress, especially when we have a new perspective. What mindset will shift our ability to navigate these consistent themes successfully? Developers first. Let me explain by way of several examples.
Busting the Myth of API Management
We’ve all heard the prediction that we’re moving away from the monolithic one-size-fits-all method to API management.
Here’s the hard truth (more here, if you’re curious): You can’t manage your way into API quality and consistency — you have to develop it. Scan through those “trends” above and the point holds true: No API company could keep up without good developers writing quality API code. The lesson? Developers can’t be overlooked in an API program that has a hope of delivering success.
So why do we put so many obstacles in developers’ way? In part, the answer is sprawl.
The Proliferation of Proliferation
The API industry is growing faster than ever, even if business fundamentals aren’t changing much. Seventy-one percent of internet traffic is now made up of API calls, according to apidays’ 2024 State of the Market Report. Gartner predicts a 30% increase in API usage driven by AI and large language models (LLMs) by 2026, while Postman’s 2024 State of the API Report describes a 73% increase in AI-driven API traffic.
This growth is great news for many of us in the API industry. On the other hand, this is scope creep taken to an extreme degree.
According to F5, an estimated 200 million APIs are active worldwide, a number projected to grow to over 1.7 billion by 2030. Many are unmaintained, poorly indexed, insecure and inconsistently documented, but they’re still out there, and if they’re layered deep in your dependencies, you may not even realize you’re using them.
APIs need to be 100% reliable to be usable in production applications. Many companies aren’t equipped to deliver that level of consistency with the current scope of API sprawl, let alone as it continues to grow. This isn’t a knock on the people — it’s an indictment of our processes.
API management, a top-down approach, works from a unified goal and project management process. To cover the scope, often we’d have to spend most of our resources on program management and have little left for development, and this is where the management-centric view falls short.
Developers Need Support That Doesn’t Get in Their Way
An alternative to the top-down approach involves shifting priorities and focusing on where APIs are built and used: by developers.
Professional developers will tell you how much they enjoy being in “the zone,” experiencing a flow state in which they’re exceptionally productive and energized. It’s a feeling familiar to us, whether it was while solving puzzles, playing games or even writing code.
No kid gets hooked on writing code because they dream of one day using agile methodology, and no developer stays engaged because they love lengthy design review processes. But do we really need all of that anyway?
I wouldn’t recommend cutting your development teams loose and telling them to have fun. However, if you can identify clear priorities, API developers can quickly turn ideas into code and cut through the sprawl to deliver solutions with little overhead.
As the industry grows, product-first, design-first, API-first and whatever-trend-first approaches aren’t going to cut it. They put too many layers between fundamental business goals and the developers who execute those goals. Developers have to be at the center of the solution.
Build in Security and Standards From the Start
The demand for better API security is another constant that’s due for a new approach. APIs are increasingly important across sectors, especially in highly regulated industries like health care, finance and public utilities. It’s not only developers working directly in those industries who need to worry about security and compliance — those companies use third-party APIs widely, so all API producers need to follow consistent practices.
According to Akamai’s 2024 State of the Internet report, 30% to 40% of cyberattacks use APIs to reach their target. The State of the API Industry report by apidays reveals that 95% of companies struggle to manage API security risks.
One of the biggest security challenges is inconsistency. I’m confident that development teams, even those with no security experts, can find ways to improve code consistency.
Platform engineering is an approach that can help organizations get on the right track by making it easier for developers to produce consistent code and maintain standards. Done right, it’s not just a philosophy: It delivers developer-friendly resources like reusable code blocks, automated governance mechanisms, shared libraries and easily replicable development environments. Developers can follow security and compliance best practices without much extra work.
Support Developers With Select AI Tools
2023 was AI’s hype year. In 2024, some of the luster (and panic) wore off. In a way, the growth of AI is just another variation on a familiar story: New technologies come around all the time, and we have to adapt. The industry is starting to see the seeds of a more sustainable model of AI usage, and it follows the same pattern as the developer-centric approach, favoring efficiency, collaboration and security.
According to the apidays report, 13% of API tool vendors are now integrating AI. This includes our tool, Blackbird, which uses AI in a chat-based spec generator. Writing specifications can be tedious and time-consuming, but using AI produces more consistent results faster and makes validating and sharing them easier. The right tools can also help you generate boilerplate code from those AI-generated specs, getting your devs to the customization and debugging steps faster.
These are the sorts of improvements I’m looking for from AI in the near term. Tool companies are responding to the way developers already work and using AI to better meet their needs. The result is that developers have more time and energy to spend on the work they excel at: writing API code. It’s not revolutionary, it’s evolutionary — and that’s the point.
Now, Let’s Get Into Why These 5 Trends Matter
Developer-First Is Efficient for Modern Architectures
One meaningful trend in APIs has been underway for several years. Companies are moving away from product life cycle approaches that emphasize large, monolithic API management services.
By 2030, F5 predicts there will be 2 billion APIs with (generously) a shelf life of less than a year. Microservices architectures regularly use dozens of small-scale APIs with minimal dependency so they can be replaced as needed. The rise of serverless architecture, projected to grow to a $44.7B sector by 2029, also predicts more investment in APIs with short development cycles and shelf lives.
Modern APIs aren’t all durable, full-featured products, and don’t need to be. If you’re taking multiple cross-functional agile sprints to design an API you’ll use for less than a year, you’re wasting resources building a system that will probably be overspecified and bloated.
The alternative is to use tools and processes centered around an API developer’s unit of work, which is a single endpoint. No matter the scope or lifespan of an API, it will consist of endpoints, and each of those has to be written by a developer, one at a time. It’s another way that turning back to the fundamentals can help you adapt to new trends.
Scrape away the excess of product life cycle management and empower developers with tools that support how they prefer to work. Developers will spend more of their time in their flow state, plugging away on purposeful, high-quality code, and you’ll save time and money — a value that will outlast any trend.
Collaboration Is Faster When It’s Developer-Centric
Your developers still need to work between and among teams. This requirement won’t ever go away, but there’s no need for collaboration to be clunky and slow.
Once again, the best collaboration model starts with how your developers work together, then tools and processes are built based on that foundation. For example, developers need to be able to spin up prod-like environments on their own to debug in a realistic setting. Especially if they’re working in a containerized or serverless architecture, devs need to know that they’re building for the latest development environment so their code will work in production. They don’t want to have to ask the DevOps team to create a new development environment for them every time something changes. The DevOps team doesn’t want that either, and neither do you.
Ask your developers how they would like to collaborate. What are the key areas where they need support? Tailor your processes and tools to those needs. Chat-based spec generation, rapid mock APIs and ephemeral environments are some of the features that our team has found effective for streamlining collaboration among our developers.
The best fit for your organization will start with understanding how your developers work. By letting go of the product life cycle focus, they’ll be able to build faster and better with less overhead.
Developing the 2025 API Future
Technology will keep evolving, and the way we employ AI might look quite different in a few years. Serverless architecture is the hot trend now, but something else will eventually overtake it. No doubt, cybercriminals will keep surprising us with new attacks. Trends evolve, but underlying fundamentals — like efficiency, the need for collaboration, the value of consistency and the need to adapt — will always be what drives business decisions.
For the API industry, the key to keeping up with trends without sacrificing fundamentals is to take a developer-centric approach. Developers will always create the core value of your APIs. Their workflow will change as the industry’s needs change, but that’s no reason for panic.
Think of new trends as variations on fundamentals, and the path forward becomes clear. Put developer productivity first, and your developers will produce better APIs.
