Like everyone, I use a lot of apps and services for various things. I’m writing this article into Notion right now! I’ll probably check Mastodon in a few minutes. I’m sure I’ll use other apps before the end of the day like Streaks, Reeder, The StoryGraph, Overcast, Serializd, United, and Parcel.
Something that I’ve been starting to evaluate about a lot more about new apps is whether they let me extract my data easily. As I work on my /now page but even before then I’ve been looking at a lot of apps, especially ones that I use for tracking explicitly but even those that I know are implicitly tracking some of my usage, I’ve been very interested in how I can get that data out of those silos and into my own site.
Lately as I look at a new app and consider whether I want to use it, one of the things I check before I commit to using it is whether it is easy to extract the data I’m creating in that app. I think about whether there’s an API I can use to pull data. I look into whether that’s a well documented API or something internal that I have to hope doesn’t change on me. If there’s not an API, I think about how easy it is to scrape the data off of the site[^tailwind] and check the Terms of Use to see if I’ll get into trouble for doing that. I look for RSS feeds of my activity. I check for data export tools and try them out to see if they’re available instantly or if they take a few hours or days to generate. Sometimes I even reach out to developers (usually of indie iOS apps) to see if there’s an API I can beta test for them.
[^tailwind] Tailwind’s rise in popularity has made this more difficult in my experience as developers give up on semantic markup and classes in favor of what is effectively effectively an inline style attribute.
The harder it is for me to pull data out, the less likely I am to use a new service these days, and the more likely I am to want to move my data and usage to a new service or to build my own.