To be fair, it’s not like the GCP APIs are much easier to use. It’s probably the right thing for infra and payment services to have a higher bar for API security, plus they’re hugely complex and usually used as an SDK. That said, I haven’t been very impressed with the Google API dev experience. Example: I was just trying to post some timing data to Google Analytics via Go, and the documented example didn’t work in addition to being very hard to find. I eventually got lost in Firebase docs, which appeared to be wholly unrelated to what I was trying to do, had many additional separate APIs, required that I set up a new project in Firebase in addition to my GA “property”… On top of all of this, the GitHub auto-generated API examples were outdated (used a previous version that referenced deprecated docs) with no hints as to where to go from there.

In the end, I gave up, because I wasn’t willing to invest hours into learning all the idiosyncrasies. Ended up using Influxdata’s SaaS and got what I wanted going in about 15 minutes. To be fair, most of that time was also because their API docs didn’t actually work as posted and didn’t go through properly installing the client lib, which someone more experienced with Go probably would have gotten past more quickly.