lowolf / itunes-app-scraper

A simple Python scraper for the iTunes App Store

iTunes App Store Scraper

This defines a lightweight Python class that can be used to scrape app information from the iTunes App Store. It defines a couple of methods that can be used to get relevant app IDs given a set of parameters, and a couple of methods to then scrape data about these app IDs.

Much of this has been adapted from app-store-scraper, a nodeJS-based scraper that does similar things. But this scraper uses Python.

Getting started

The following scrapes app details about all apps similar to the first result for the 'fortnite' search query:

from itunes_app_scraper.scraper import AppStoreScraper

scraper = AppStoreScraper()
results = scraper.get_app_ids_for_query("fortnite")
similar = scraper.get_similar_app_ids_for_app(results[0])

app_details = scraper.get_multiple_app_details(similar)
print(list(app_details))

Documentation is not available separately yet, but the code is relatively simple and you can look in the scraper.py file to see what methods are available and what their parameters are.

Sources of Data:

Query	Source	URL base
App	Affiliates API	https://itunes.apple.com/lookup?
Search	Old Affiliates?	https://search.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/search?
Developer	Affiliates API	https://itunes.apple.com/lookup?
List	Old Affiliates	http://ax.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStoreServices.woa/ws/RSS/
Similar	iTunes store scrape HTML	https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/app/
Full Details	Affiliates API	https://itunes.apple.com/lookup?
Ratings	iTunes store scrape HTML	https://itunes.apple.com/lookup?

License

This scraper was developed by the Digital Methods Initiative, and is distributed under the MIT license. See LICENSE for details.