The platforms that grew on open APIs are the same ones that closed them
There's a pattern that keeps repeating and I don't think we ever really named it. A platform opens up an API early, back when it's small and needs reasons for people to build on it. Developers show up and make the thing genuinely better — the good mobile client, the tool that made the mess usable, the bot everyone actually liked. The platform gets big partly because of that ecosystem. Then, once the network effect has locked users in, the API gets expensive or restricted or just quietly killed, and all those third-party tools die in a quarter.
Reddit did it. Twitter did it. It's happened enough times that it looks less like a run of separate business decisions and more like a lifecycle stage. Open to grow, closed to extract.
The part that gets me is that the openness was never really a gift — it was a growth loan the users and developers didn't know they were making. The unpaid work of building the ecosystem got absorbed, and the reward for building the best client was getting cut off once you'd proven the demand existed.
"Just don't build on closed platforms" isn't a real answer either, because at the small stage they don't look closed. That's the whole trick. Open protocols solve it in theory and keep losing on convenience.
Is there any signal early on that tells you an open API is a real commitment versus a temporary land-grab? Or is the only safe assumption that any API you don't control will eventually be taken away?
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