I think your definition of API is very useful, but API is the wrong term. It’s much more general than that and is used in contexts where these constraints don’t

I think your definition of API is very useful, but API is the wrong term. It’s much more general than that and is used in contexts where these constraints don’t even make sense. Specifically a hypermedia API is something browsers (and the implicit backbone of the internet) understand very well. In fact you have to go out of your way to serve an application that your browser doesn’t inherently understand. The clarity that seems to be lacking here is not necessarily a fault of the author. We re-purposed some of these terms (REST, API etc.) to serve specific needs. But then kind of lost the understanding of what we had before. I think that’s not our fault though. Standardization didn’t move fast enough and the quality we needed in the mobile context wasn’t there.