How do I programatically pull lists/arrays of (itunes urls to) apps in the iphone app store?

Question

I'd like to know how to pragmatically pull lists of apps from the iphone app store. I'd code this in python (via the google app engine) or in an iphone app. My goal would be to select maybe 5 of them and present them to the user. (for instance a top 5 kind of thing, or advanced filtering or queries)

Answer 1

Unfortunately the only API that seems to be around for Apple's app store is a commercial offering from ABTO; nobody seems to have developed a free one. I'm afraid you'll have to resort to "screen scraping" -- urlget things, use beautifulsoup or the like for interpreting the HTML you get, and be ready to fix breakages whenever Apple tweaks their formats &c. It seems Apple has no interest in making such a thing available to developers (although as far as I can't tell they're not actively fighting against it either, they appear to just not care).