Question

I ve found a PDF file of Appstore search API, that I can use some parameters to fetch an application s detail information.(sorry I forgot the download url, but I found it in stackoverflow)
But there are so many sites that show you a Top100 list(like appshopper.com), and such as Mobclix.com also provide you the rank information.How can they do that? I didn t find the related API in the PDF file.
I also found an Appstore API by ABTO(http://www.abtollc.com/AppStoreAPI.aspx), but I really wanna do it by myself.
If I clear the 1st question, then I d like to know the common architecture of building a website based on the appstore data. Do I need a database to cache the appstore s data, and create a batch to fetch the data frequently, execute like once per hour? I think it might not be clever to access the appstore for every user request, and may be there is a access limit of appstore?

Thanks for your help!

Answer 1

You can use the following link to generate a url for querying iTunes Data for things like the top 100 apps in a particular category.

http://itunes.apple.com/rss/generator/

For the top 100 free productivity apps the generated url is

http://ax.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStoreServices.woa/ws/RSS/topfreeapplications/sf=143441/limit=100/genre=6007/xml

The PDF that you link to is very old and hasn t been updated in quite some time, but even if you did get that working, it doesn t have "Top 100" selections (to my knowledge).

Answer 2

1.The way people do to get information from the AppStore is to parse the Xml returned from ITunes web call, and get the information they want. There s no official api release from apple.

You may be right, its more clever to save a copy of app information on your server.

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