A short piece of fiction, written by API Evangelist. The reader is imagined; the post they read, and every number in it, is real: "One In Ten API Providers Still Publish Swagger," Kin Lane, October 5, 2026, https://apievangelist.com/2026/10/05/one-in-ten-api-providers-still-publish-swagger/
Dana read it on the train, which was a mistake, because by the second table she wanted a laptop and had only a phone.
The headline was the kind she usually scrolled past. One in ten API providers still publish Swagger. Fine. Somebody counted something. But the post did not start with the count. It started with the count being wrong. The author had asked his own archive how many providers were on each version, and the archive said 3,128 were on OpenAPI 3.1.0. Then he went and looked, and a lot of those files were his own pipeline's output, filed in a folder labelled as if the providers had published them. "So the archive could not answer the question," he wrote. "It could only tell me what we had written down."
Dana read that line twice. Her team had a folder like that. Everyone did.
So he had gone back out and fetched. A spec counted only if it parsed and was served from a host the provider controlled. Out of 8,324 repositories, 2,281 companies passed. Of those, 190 served Swagger 2.0 and nothing else. Another 56 served both Swagger and OpenAPI 3.x. That was the one in ten: "about one in ten API providers still publishes Swagger 2.0, and one in twelve publishes nothing newer."
She thought about the swagger.json her service still served, generated by a library nobody had upgraded since the person who added it left. She had always assumed that file made them a straggler, the last ones in the room. Apparently the room was bigger than she thought. "Swagger is not gone," the post said. "It is a long tail of providers who wrote a definition once, years ago, and have had no reason to touch it since."
That was them, exactly. No reason to touch it.
The next part was what made her miss her stop. OpenAPI 3.1.0 was the most common version, 1,093 companies, and it would have been easy to read that as the industry upgrading. The author did not. He split the companies by whether they were AI companies: 63.8% of the AI companies were on 3.1 or later, against 37.8% of everyone else. Then he sampled 300 of the 3.1.0 documents, and a quarter carried FastAPI's fingerprint. FastAPI has emitted 3.1.0 by default since mid-2023. The newest version was winning mostly because the newest companies were using a framework that wrote it for them.
He was careful to call that his reading of the numbers and not something providers had told him. Dana appreciated that. She also thought he was right.
Because what was her team's version, really? Not a decision. A default. Whatever the generator wrote the day someone installed it. Nobody had ever held a meeting about Swagger 2.0. And OpenAPI 3.2, out for a year, showed up for five companies in the whole count. Five.
"Versions are mostly set by defaults," the post said, and then the line she screenshotted: "If the OpenAPI community wants 3.2 adopted, the place to win that is the default in FastAPI, springdoc, Swashbuckle and the docs platforms, not the provider's roadmap."
At the bottom was a section most posts do not have, about what the numbers did not cover. Only 2,379 of the 8,324 repositories with a definition, 29%, served one that could be fetched and checked. The rest were excluded rather than counted as anything. It was a snapshot from October 4. A spec published somewhere he had not looked was missing.
She liked that he showed the hole in his own data instead of standing in front of it.
At her desk she did not upgrade anything. She opened the repo, found the dependency that generated their swagger.json, and wrote one ticket: find out what version our generator emits if we bump it, and whether anything downstream breaks. Then, under it, a second one, smaller and harder: check whether the spec we serve is the one we think we serve.
The second ticket was the one the post had really been about.