Part of the problem is that APIs are intrinsically harder to interop with than a local file format, for fundamental reasons like latency and shared state that o

Part of the problem is that APIs are intrinsically harder to interop with than a local file format, for fundamental reasons like latency and shared state that others might modify from underneath you. You couldn't just read once at the beginning and then keep things in synchronous memory thereafter, persisting as needed but never reading again. Of course that doesn't mean the accessibility situation couldn't be improved with (for example) more standardized APIs, better documentation/discoverability, etc. iOS Shortcuts make it easy to work with third-party services; what would the equivalent in a real programming context look like? There's probably some interesting brainstorming to be done here.