I’ve seen this often. The app is marketed as being “api” first as if that’s some benefit to the user of a SaaS application. However in reality much of the team is constantly busy patching the old legacy V1 api to keep it running. And management won’t authorize the budget to create a new api version that replaces the old one, because it still works right?

Public facing web apis have always been a pet peeve of mine. So often the team uses the api their own frontend uses as the public facing api customers should use for integrations. Which on the surface seems smart, why implement and manage two apis that’s just overhead. But in reality the apis suitable for a frontend (or often that specific frontend) isn’t suitable for integrations at all. They both have a completely different target user and completely different requirements.

But hey we’ll just market it as “headless”, because one could totally put in the years of work and money we put in to create our front-end, if they really wanted to. Totally realistic thing that happens.