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Pricing is the main issue. API's usually aren't free, especially as you grow your business. Most consumers don't have a problem with their main apps; if you can
by antasvara 3y ago
Pricing is the main issue. API's usually aren't free, especially as you grow your business. Most consumers don't have a problem with their main apps; if you can't create this service for free or a super low cost, it's hard to get buy-in.
Most apps also want to make it easy for you to do repetitive tasks quickly. Doordash has a "recent orders" section where I can tap to reorder. That's pretty seamless.
This general idea holds across most large consumer apps: if something is done repetitively, the app has a way to make that process faster. As such, a personal assistant only becomes useful for edge cases like "ordering from a new restaurant where you already know what you want and know that it's on Doordash."
Even in your example of "book a tennis court at 6," you might run into issues. What if the court is booked at 6? I might have secondary times in mind, or I might be willing to settle for a 45 minute session if it's available. All of this is easier to deal with using a calendar interface. And what if different times cost different amounts of money? I wouldn't necessarily know what amount that hour at 6 would cost, and that may matter to me.
Poimt being that these apps work well for one thing: tasks that you do repetitively many times, that aren't sped up by the original app itself, and where things won't change. That ends up being a pretty limited usecase, even if you can keep the service cheap.
- Libcat99 3y agoThe reasons why I want api for my consumer apps have more to do with my own automation desires than with any personal assistant. Our kids use a kid friendly debit card product where we can fund their accounts on demand. I also have a chore schedule system I built where they enter their chores each day. I'd love to be able to automate allowance based on chore completion but there's no way to integrate the two. Every 2 weeks I enter all my accounts, credit cards, etc into a spreadsheet for graphing and tracking. I'd love if there was an api for these services to fetch the data instead of manually logging in.
- yoav 3y agoJust make them fill out a timesheet in google sheets or something. And then their chore “paycheck” is every two weeks. Like simulated work / prep for the real world.
- fragmede 3y agoSeems like it would get dark pretty quickly. take taxes out of their paycheck. Give one of their friends an allowance from those taxes, but don't make them do any work for it. don't pay them every two weeks due to "a computer glitch". pay the kids different rates and prohibit them from talking about it with each other. threaten to adopt an immigrant kid who will work faster and harder and eat less food, and can live in the closet under the stairs. make is clear that one of the two kids is replaceable with said immigrant child, so they fight with each other instead of unionizing. if one of them gets injured, don't feed them while they're not doing chores. make the other kids work twice as much but don't pay them anything extra, make it clear they should be glad they can do chores and haven't been replaced yet.
- throwaway-blaze 3y agoThis leads me to wonder where exactly you've been working to form the opinions behind this joke :)
- DANmode 3y agoAny Walmart or Dairy Queen in the United States?
- vineyardmike 3y agoI don’t think you can easily move money with an API but if you’re willing to write code to solve a problem, you could use the Plaid API and Google Docs API (or msft word or whatever) to handle the account tracking and graphing.