How is my iPhone app info available to be advertised on other sites as well?

Question

I have a few apps on the iPhone app store, and I have some questions about how my app description is available on third party sites. There are other websites that advertise and promote apps just like the app store, how do they get all the info? Is there some sort of RSS feed from Apple that I don't know about?

I have also gotten a few emails from various app developing companies, offering their services, how did they get my info? Its obviously available in the app store, but they surely didn't go through and just copy the email addresses of all the apps in the store.

I would like to find a way to get in touch with the iPhone developer community similar to how I have received emails as an iPhone developer.

Any thoughts or insights on all of these questions would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

I wouldn't doubt that there are descriptions of iPhone apps available on an Apple webpage somewhere. It wouldn't be too difficult to look at the URLs that are sent over a wireless connection and see where the iPhone is going. Then these 3rd party sites could scrape the HTML pages and post that information on their own page.

The closest I could find to an official list of apps was this page [1], but it seemed to have many fewer apps than the actual store.

[1] http://www.apple.com/webapps/index_abc.html

Answer 2

They intercept the XML that iTunes exchanges with Apple's servers and reverse engineer the content. Two good articles describing how this is done can be found at:

• http://www.mobileorchard.com/app-store-data-mining-techniques-revealed-part-1/
• http://www.mobileorchard.com/app-store-data-mining-techniques-revealed-part-2-scripting-app-store-xml-downloads/