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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-01T03:50:21+00:00

So this is more of a general question about apps and techniques rather than

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So this is more of a general question about apps and techniques rather than a specific code question…

When developing an larger app, how would a developer access lots of data from a website. The example I’ll use is an app like Yelp. They have both a web-access site and an app, both share the same information. I would imagine that information like that is stored on the website via some sort of MySQL database and the iOS device access’s it as needed based on the user’s requests.

How might a developer writing an app start something like this? I assume you need to somehow securely tie the MySQL database to iOS and so on. I’ve seen a lot of techniques on the web, but they all seem very simple and not safe for a large scale app.

Any ideas would be awesome!

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  1. Editorial Team

    The key term you’re looking for is “API” (Application Programming Interface).

    A Yelp iOS app won’t access Yelp’s databases directly. There will be a layer (I simplify here somewhat) between that and the iOS app; this layer will provide a series of methods (the API) by which clients can make queries and potentially manipulate remote state.

    A common API format is JSON over HTTP, and indeed, this is what the official Yelp API seems to be.

    Good starting points would be the documentation for NSURLConnection and NSJSONSerialization, and the Yelp API documentation I link above.

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