question Does drop catchers use special API

I think you are messing between few different things.

The meaning of "drop catching service" is that they are catching drops. Which are domains that have already passed the expire state and are being released by registry. They are already for long time not under the registrar administration. Thus, the drop catcher is a registrar, or owns a registrar, or cooperates with a registrar, which tries to register the dropping domain from the registry.

May be registrars have some special contacts between themselves to grab their expiring domains, this i have no idea.

golan said:

I think you are messing between few different things.

The meaning of "drop catching service" is that they are catching drops. Which are domains that have already passed the expire state and are being released by registry. They are already for long time not under the registrar administration. Thus, the drop catcher is a registrar, or owns a registrar, or cooperates with a registrar, which tries to register the dropping domain from the registry.

May be registrars have some special contacts between themselves to grab their expiring domains, this i have no idea.

Click to expand...

But shouldn't this mean that domain age will be reset because domain is being released by registry (which in case of .com will be ICANN I suppose?) for anyone to register?
I am under the impression that if you acquire a domain through drop catcher, the domain age doesn't reset.

Or does drop catcher works when domain is being released from registrar (GoDaddy) to registry (ICANN)?

Right. If it's drop catcher, it gets the domain from registry. Not ICANN directly, but Verisign etc.

Why do you care about the domain age? What difference does it make, in your eyes?

Domain age does matter in some case as it can appreciate its value. But my point was to understand about APIs and stuff. What I understood that anyone can write a software using registrar's API like GoDaddy to catch a domain once it's available. Now whether you actually get that domain is different story because drop catchers are running a very elaborate and efficient system and you can't compete with them unless you spend a lot of dollars.
Plus you also need to take into account throttling by registrar if you access their APIs too quickly.

EDIT
What I don't understand how domain retains its age in this case.

Okay. You as an end user can use a registrar API and try catching a dropping domain. The registrar then sends registration requests to the registry, and you initiate these request via API.

A dropcatcher doesn't need to use another registrar API because they are registrar itself. Why on Earth would they use it's competitor's API if they can communicate with the registry itself using EPP or what not fancy protocols??

I think you should learn something about how the whole domain business operates, with all due respect to your years on this forum.

And: forget about the age. If you for some twisted reasons still care of the age, grab domains on auctions, while they are still at the registrars. Once the domain is expired, the age is nilled. Frankly i don't see any value in this age. For me only one age is somehow important, - when the domain was registered for the first time.