Apple Blocking Access to the AppStore?
I got a chance to investigate the strange access problems I found last week trying to scrape the iPhone Appstore. It looks to me like something has definitely changed on the server, but it’s hard to see what. My original script used curl with its default user string, and that seemed to suffer timeout problems on every page. So I by changed the agent string to the firefox one, which seemed to result in an immediate improvement, but it too started to suffer slowdowns as it progressed through the store. Finally I changed all timeouts to 5 minutes and it looks like every call returned successfully. So all I can think of is that requests that aren’t from the iPhone or iTunes are being served, but they’re being sent to the back of the queue. I don’t see much logic in all this, but the Apple do move in mysterious ways sometimes, and it’s always possible it’s a quirk rather than a policy decision. But the good news is that access is still being permitted at some level and we can go on cutting and dicing appstore content into something useful.
[...] paul wrote an interesting post today onApple Blocking Access to the AppStore? – paul hinks#39; blogHere’s a quick excerpt [...]