How Location APIs Can Make Your Life Easier

Applications may need location information of visitors for many reasons. Businesses often obtain visitor locations through apps and customize them by location. The working principle of the location acquisition process is that the IP addresses of the visitors are obtained from the applications and the location data corresponding to this IP address is obtained within a 3rd party service or application itself.

For location information corresponding to IP address, web services that provide location API service are generally preferred by applications. Ipstack is one of the most popular web services today that returns data corresponding to the IP address.

With the API provided by Ipstack, it offers more than the location data that applications need. It provides a very fast service return in order to avoid any delays by the applications. By providing detailed location data, it provides convenience for almost all customizations that can be made regarding the location provided to the applications.

Let's take a look at how the Ipstack API, which provides location service, provides convenience to developers and businesses.

Usages of Location API: Ipstack

There are many conveniences that Ipstack provides for both developers and business owners. The first of these is that the API provided by Ipstack is highly functional. It allows you to obtain detailed data of both single and multiple IP addresses with a single endpoint according to the needs of the applications in various situations. With this convenience of the Fixer API, there is no need to make a single service call each time for location data corresponding to more than one IP address on the applications side.

Another feature of Fixer that saves the lives of developers is that the return type of the API can be customized with parameters. For example, you have XML parsing operations in your application layer and you want the format of the incoming data to be XML. Since Fixer is developed with a developer-friendly approach, it provides developers with data in XML or JSON format, allowing you to easily integrate it into the code structure. With the example below, the format of the response returned from the Fixer API will be XML.

https://api.ipstack.com/check?access_key=c1*****51&output=xml

The greatest convenience provided by many services that provide location services such as Fixer API is that it provides location information corresponding to the IP address to the applications. Fixer API provides a lot of convenience to the developers by presenting the location information in a very detailed way against the location IP address. The data it contains includes many fields such as continent information, currency, currency symbol.

Here is an example response of Fixer API which provide location service:

{
    "ip": "101.234.150.58",
    "type": "ipv4",
    "continent_code": "OC",
    "continent_name": "Oceania",
    "country_code": "AU",
    "country_name": "Australia",
    "region_code": "NSW",
    "region_name": "New South Wales",
    "city": "Bourke",
    "zip": "2840",
    "latitude": -30.088850021362305,
    "longitude": 145.937744140625,
    "location": {
        "geoname_id": null,
        "capital": "Canberra",
        "languages": [
      {
        "code": "en",
        "name": "English",
        "native": "English"
      }
    ],
    "country_flag": "https://assets.ipstack.com/flags/au.svg",
    "country_flag_emoji": "\ud83c\udde6\ud83c\uddfa",
    "country_flag_emoji_unicode": "U+1F1E6 U+1F1FA",
    "calling_code": "61",
    "is_eu": false
  },
  "time_zone": {
    "id": null,
    "current_time": null,
    "gmt_offset": null,
    "code": null,
    "is_daylight_saving": null
  },
  "currency": {
    "code": "AUD",
    "name": "Australian Dollar",
    "plural": "Australian dollars",
    "symbol": "AU$",
    "symbol_native": "$"
  },
  "connection": {
    "asn": 45577,
    "isp": "Intervolve Pty Ltd"
  },
  "security": {
    "is_proxy": false,
    "proxy_type": null,
    "is_crawler": false,
    "crawler_name": null,
    "crawler_type": null,
    "is_tor": false,
    "threat_level": "low",
    "threat_types": null
  }
}

                        

One of the reasons why web services that provide location services are preferred by applications and websites is to obtain location information quickly from more reliable sources. Applications do not have logic to find extra location information, instead, this data is obtained with an API and code complexity is avoided.

One of the most important advantages of using web services that provide location services for businesses is that it is easier to take steps to expand the business. With Location APIs, it becomes very easy to add new features to applications, come up with new ideas and develop new applications. Today, web services that provide location API are actively used in many areas such as map applications, e-commerce sites, news sites, friendship applications and logistic systems. Location API is of great importance for many brands that set international targets, especially in e-commerce systems. With the data it provides, it allows both analysis and statistics.

Conclusion

The popularity of location APIs is increasing day by day with the many conveniences it provides in application development processes. If you want to both grow your businesses with new ideas and provide many conveniences to your developers during application development, you should take a look at Fixer API, which offers location service.