AppStore scraping – back to the drawing board
Tuesday, June 9th, 2009I had assumed that in a browse URL such as http://ax.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/browse?path=/6014/7001/1, the last number was some kind of paging option, with each page returning up to 2500 apps. iTunes only seems to display that umber or items per category, and that’s the format of the URL it uses, so it made sense. But having actually tried it I find out that the xml returned is the same regardless of the number at the end. It returns an error if you don’t put a number, but put anything from 0 to 99 and you get the same list of apps. Which is kind of a pain, because that leaves a lot of apps unreachable. I can get to around 35000 using the browse method, but according to apptism there are currently around 49000 apps. The only way round this that I can see is to abandon the browse approach and scrape from the front page link for each category and page through 20 at a time. It’s probably going to be slow but I don’t see any choice at the moment. Of course I’ll report my findings here.