The government on Wednesday updated its policy around CoWIN public APIs saying that data may now be up to 30 minutes old. This directly impacts the usefulness of numerous third-party apps and services that have sprung up in the last week to help people find vaccination slots. APIs, or Application Programming Interfaces, help third parties connect to a service; in the case of CoWIN, APIs have been used to automatically fetch data on newly opened vaccine slots. This may soon not happen as easily as it has been so far: "The [CoWIN site's vaccine] appointment availability data is cached and may be up to 30 minutes old. Further, these APIs are subject to a rate limit of 100 API calls per 5 minutes per IP." - API Setu website. MediaNama reported earlier on Wednesday on how the tech-savvy are gaining upper hand in finding vaccination slots using these public APIs. While the government has officially opened up the COVID19 vaccination program to people in the 18-45 age group, not many are able to get a vaccine because very few appointment slots have been opened for this age group. This scarcity has led developers to use the CoWIN public APIs to build solutions in the form of apps, websites, and scripts to help the tech-savvy grab all slots minutes after they are opened. Are third-party apps useful anymore? Third-party apps allow users to search for open slots according to district and/or pin code and to register for alerts through email, Telegram and Twitter when slots…
