Introduction

info

WhereAPI is a simple service to help developers building for an African audience solve location-related problems. It maintains an up-to-date, sorted database of location information ready to plug in to your app.

Motivation

If you have worked on a product that required collecting and indexing location-related information for an African audience, I bet you’d agree this experience is pretty fragmented.

You could take one of 3 approaches

• Free form: Allow users to enter their location themselves. The easiest approach, but it'll eventually hurt you. You'll have a database of hot mess caused by people who can't spell Nassarrawwa.
• Homegrown: Index and maintain a database of locations and their relationships. I've learned this is how most people solve this problem and it works well for very large apps. But it's very stressfull and requires a lot of time.
• Third Party APIs: Get on-demand location-related information via an API. Usually updated, indexed and always ready to plug in. This is the solution you would want to use.

Where API follows the third approach. And is a quite straightforward way to collect and index location-related information for countries in Africa.

Use cases

• In a side project for collecting location information
• Building a frontend to consume the API and index locations

Jump to the next section to get started

caution

WhereAPI is currently in development and shouldn't be used in production. A v1.0 should be ready by the end of March 2021. Location-related functionality is currrently available for Nigeria and Kenya.