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I'm writing a small Android app that issues customizable queries and displays the results in a read-only format. I might implement oauth-2 in a future version, but want to leave it out of version 1.0 (since it's basically just browsing publicly available information).

The app does include my API key with each query (which is clearly necessary, because queries from my IP address were starting to get throttled without it). But I wonder if there are some softer throttling limits, because I'm now getting results with has_more=false when I know that there's a lot more data available.

Specifically, I'm getting two responses with 100 entries each and has_more=true, followed by a third response with 100 entries and has_more=false (although there should be many more pages).

I've been stress-testing the app for the past two days, so there's definitely been a lot of traffic from my IP address. But I'm not even close to the 10k quota limit. Are there other limits that I should be aware of?

Other than this one problem, I think my app's ready for general release. Although it's a humble beginning, other people might find it useful, and I'd like some feedback from other users before adding enhancements. But I don't want to release it if I'm using the API in an unsupported manner.

So my main question is: If I release a login-free app that includes an API key but no tokens, and other people start using it (moderately), will this cause problems?

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Yes, it is perfectly okay. You only need an access_token (OAuth/login) if you are trying to change data, or are accessing private information for a logged-in user.
See the Authentication docs for more info.

The issue you are having with has_more is unrelated and is a known, current, bug.




Aside: Using an access_token will never decrease any secondary throttling. It's rather the opposite as all API ops become more expensive and all write operations are subject to various limits whether you use the API to do them or not. (The effect on read ops is probably miniscule, but nobody has ever tested this.)

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