epidatr is now more mature and likely a better experience for fetching covidcast data than the covidcast R package, and
the delphi epidata clients offer data both from covidcast and from other "endpoints" of the API.
User story
A first-time user browses sequentially through the delphi-epidata docs, sees this page. Goal: they will understand epidatr is an option for accessing covidcast data. This may require some extra explanation though... epidatr is often faster at just fetching the data, presents it in a convenient tibble format, and has additional endpoints available, while covidcast has some side features that are not present in epidatr: pivoting, plotting, covidcast_metadata summarization, and population data.
A potential client package user may also google "covidcast api client" or "covidcast api package" or "covidcast package" and arrive here or here, and dismiss epidatr as not for covidcast data or not realizing that it exists.
Additional context
@XuedaShen flagged this as (i) it was unclear what the relationship between the covidcast and epidatr packages were, and (ii) it'd be useful to directly point users to epidatr on the covidcast clients page.
It would be great if we could update the client library documentation
to reflect that
User story
A first-time user browses sequentially through the delphi-epidata docs, sees this page. Goal: they will understand epidatr is an option for accessing covidcast data. This may require some extra explanation though... epidatr is often faster at just fetching the data, presents it in a convenient tibble format, and has additional endpoints available, while covidcast has some side features that are not present in epidatr: pivoting, plotting,
covidcast_metadatasummarization, and population data.A potential client package user may also google "covidcast api client" or "covidcast api package" or "covidcast package" and arrive here or here, and dismiss epidatr as not for covidcast data or not realizing that it exists.
Additional context
@XuedaShen flagged this as (i) it was unclear what the relationship between the covidcast and epidatr packages were, and (ii) it'd be useful to directly point users to epidatr on the covidcast clients page.