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!
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/
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
Related
We have a mobile site for our existing website. We have just created an iOS application with back and forward buttons along with an activity indicator. Will it be rejected by Apple? If yes, what else we can include to get the app approved for the App Store?
It will be rejected
The App Store submission guidelines say:
2.12
Apps that are not very useful, unique, are simply web sites bundled as Apps, or do not provide any lasting entertainment value may be rejected
I've also heard many stories about people who have made 'apps' for their website that might even have features like automatically logging in the user, that Apple still rejected.
Here's the problem. We have several partner to promo our apps (at Apple App Store). But we can't know how many downloads from each partner.
Is there have any solution?
Apple provides no analytics information as to referer for any download. If you put your own analytics in the app, you might be able to guess a referral if a customer use the same IP address for the first run of the app as for the referrer, but an estimate using this method won't be accurate for a number of reasons.
Here is my requirement ,
Obtaining the list of apps from the AppStore, This contains basic information of the app.
Provide ratings to these app from my app.
Is there an API from Apple where i can achieve the above.
Isn't this what the "App store" app is doing by default? I am not sure Apple is going to approve that if you manage to do something like that. Apple certainly wont want a duplicate....
You simply cannot. Apple forbids you from scraping their sites in Apps on the App Store.
From Apple's "Review Guidelines" - section 12
http://images.worldofapple.com/appstoreguidelines_9910.pdf
Scraping and aggregation
Applications that scrape any information from Apple sites (for example from apple.com, iTunes Store, App Store, iTunes Connect, Apple Developer Programs, etc) or create rankings using content from Apple sites and services will be rejected
Applications may use approved Apple RSS feeds such as the iTunes Store RSS feed
Apps that are simply web clippings, content aggregators, or a collection of links, may be
rejected
I am currently building an app for an existing and large Royalty Free music library. They sell stock music to be used in productions/websites/commercials etc. What they sell is the license to use the music in your production.
What they want to build is an iPhone and iPad app that is basically an extension of their website. Users can browse and purchase music through the app. I am building a web service to connect to the existing website and will most likely use Webview to handle payment via PayPal. The user is then sent a download link for their music via email after successful purchase
The question I have is whether Apple will reject due to the way we are selling goods. This is an already established business and the iphone apps are just an extension of that.
Any help is really appreciated.
If you sold using in-app purchase (30% to Apple) they would probably accept it. Otherwise not, and you should stick with a web app (which you could highly customize for the iPhone/iPad).
Most likely would get rejected. One option might be to use the iPhone app to browse and sample the tracks, but link out to a mobile safari web page to complete the transaction.
It will definitely get rejected.
My app had a link to our website that had a puchase link. They rejected the app for that too.
Buying directly from the app is not allowed.
I would like to track which websites link to my app in the app store. Is this possible?
Apple do not provide metrics and I'd say they would frown on any attempts to insert analytics code into your description.
Use of Google Alerts for your app name and possibly and inurl:appID might help.