The argument is for a smaller business not for a business at a certain scale. You can argue that at a certain scale you can build out your own solutions and not rely on third party APIs, at a certain scale you can purchase the absolute premium platinum support package so you can be sure your email is answered within minutes. At a certain scale you can do a whole lot of things but this is about when you're not at that certain scale. so let's think about context here.
There's a big difference between using 2 existing geosearch APIs and building your own geosearch API. I'm saying the first one is feasible even for a smaller business.
yes if it was only geosearch API that one had integrate with. It would be manageable to maintain API changes for 2 providers for 1 service. As soon as you increase the number of services you use your solution soon becomes non-trivially complex. Consider a travel app that uses a geosearch API, a mapping API, a weather API and a enroute data points API (attractions, gas stations, hotels, etc.) Would you suggest the app developer to code 8 API integrations, a primary and secondary for each of the services and maintain them for API changes?
