i'm looking to query the itunes appstore charts to determine what position a given app holds.
this would need to go as deep as possible with a view to tracking an apps movement from launch to appearing in the top 100 and further.
any ideas?
+1
A:
There are plenty of sites out there that do this, but they all operate via some flavor of screen scraping. Apple has no API for this, and I doubt they ever will.
Ben Gottlieb
2010-01-18 13:57:46
A:
The app store data is in XML format. You can use any number of parsers — click on the search field in the top-right corner of the Stack Overflow page and type "iphone xml parse", for example, for questions about how to parse XML on an iPhone.
Alex Reynolds
2010-01-18 13:57:53
A:
Apple will likely reject your application if you use it to scrape the Apple sites directly as it violates their Terms and User Agreement. If you want to do an app like this, I suggest setting up your own service that scrapes Apple, then use the iPhone app to connect to your own servers.
As mentioned below there are plenty of good ways to grab the data. See here and here
coneybeare
2010-01-18 14:46:52