Apple blocking curl from the Appstore?
Not quite sure what’s going on with the AppStore. I just resumed my experiments and it appears that a couple of things have changed. Firstly calls from curl seem to be blocked – although changing the user agent seems to get round that. Why they would impose such a trivially bypassed hurdle is a bit of a mystery – surely if there is a target of a block there are better ways to keep them out, like ip address blocking. It is interesting that they aren’t moving to impose a total block from non-iTunes clients though, clearly that is a tacit admission that they are allowing store scraping at some level. More seriously, some of the browse URLs I was using previously don’t appear to work any more. I’m sure I can figure out what’s going on but I’m going to need more time than I have now to investigate. I’ll post back as soon as I figure it out.
[ad#co-1]
Tags: Apple, appstore, iphone, itunes, itunes appstore