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I am wondering how the various app statistics sites get app-details from Google Play. As GP does not have a public API. An example is Appaware.com - they have full details for Google Play apps.

A possible solution is scraping, however it doesn't work because Google will block you when you start sending hundreds of requests to them.

Any ideas?

p.s. "Google Play Developers API" is not a choice as it lets you access app-details only for your apps.

Stan Bright
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3 Answers3

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They use either the mobile API used by Android devices (i.e. with this library) or scrape the Google Play website. Both methods are subject to rate limiting, so they put pauses in between requests.

The mobile device API is completely undocumented and very difficult to program against. I would recommend scraping.

There is no official API or feed that you can use.

Carvellis
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  • Thanks! I tried with scrapping, however my IP has been blocked. I think the rate is very low and it is not a good option if you would like to have an overview of the whole market. I believe there should have a more viable option... – Stan Bright Jan 16 '13 at 10:40
  • Also, do you think the library you suggested would work. As it is a library for the "Android Market" and not "Google Play"? – Stan Bright Jan 16 '13 at 10:44
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    Yes it works, Android Market is the old name for Google Play, so it is the same thing. However, this API also has the same sort of rate limiting so you will not be able to go any faster than with scraping the site. – Carvellis Jan 16 '13 at 10:51
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Android Marketing API is used to get the All app details from google store, You can check it out at here: https://code.google.com/p/android-market-api/

Mehul Thakkar
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Unfortunately Google Play (previously known as Android Market) does not expose an official API.

To get the data you need, you could develop your own HTML crawler, parse the page and extract the app meta-data you need. This topic has been covered in other questions, for instance here.

If you don't want to implement all that by yourself (as you mentioned it's a complex project to do), you could use a third-party service to access Android apps meta-data through a JSON-based API.

For instance, 42matters.com (the company I work for) offers an API for both Android and iOS, you can see more details here.

The endpoints range from "lookup" (to get one app's meta-data, probably what you need) to "search", but we also expose "rank history" and other stats from the leading app stores. We have extensive documentation for all supported features, you find them in the left panel: 42matters docs

I hope this helps, otherwise feel free to get in touch with me. I know this industry quite well and can point you in the right direction.

Regards,

Andrea

agirardello
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