Working with well-known APIs is a nightmare
The problem with working with Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram's API is that you're always having to keep up with the changes. And they can end your access any time they want. You're at their mercy. Also if you're making tons of money from it, expect them to force you to pay exorbitant fees just for security-related reviews.
For that reason I'm always looking for indie APIs I can leverage and hopefully grow with.
What do you mean by Indie APIs? Are these APIs built by members of the community on top of Twitter, Facebook, etc or something different altogether?
Do I need to have app approval if I want to publish content on facebook group and Instagram account?
I want to have following permissions:
1)groups_access_member_info
2) publish_to_groups
3) instagram_basic
4) instagram_content_publish
You're certainly right. Most social networks have rules and unwritten rules you need to follow to stay in compliance. If you or your users break these rules you risk your users' accounts being suspend, or your access. We built a social media api to handle the connections, changes, and approvals. We also have a post verification system and you can see some of the different rules you'll need to follow.
I need to rewrite an Instagram integration and article after less than a year because they changed how the permissions worked. It definitely is risky to build on top of these APIs without staying in the loop of upcoming changes but ultimately these large company’s can restrict access how they see fit, especially for free access.
Shopify has a quite decent API versioning policy. They release a new version every quarter and deprecate after a year.
You may consider to use web scraping instead - especially if you need low latency data? It's challenging and slower, but could be a credible alternative in some cases.
That's the platform risk. It has both advantages and disadvantages.
Building business on Indie APIs could be more risky as you may not have established SLAs. Indie APIs are more meant for individual/company consumption.
Are you talking about the OIDC well-known discovery URL? Fundamentally they suppose to comply with the standards defined by ietf.org. Why do you think it's a nightmare?