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?
You can get the top 200 apps, podcasts, etc. from the iTunes RSS feeds:
http://itunes.apple.com/rss
edit: The iTunes RSS feeds now limit you to the top 200. Up until a week ago it would return the top 400
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.
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.
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
If you're interested in checking whether an app is being featured on the App Store homepage a category homepage, in What's new, What's hot or Staff picks, you might wanna have a look at a script I wrote:
http://www.futuretap.com/blog/scraping-app-store-featured-entries/
This will give you the top fifty songs:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/rss/topsongs/limit=50/json
Related
I am a newcomer to application development and I'm wondering if the concept I have can actually be created.
My concept involves creating an app that has the ability to embed another app within itself.
I'll do an example which is also a very bad one but you'll at least get the point.
Picture an app on the iphone that's called "Kwesi's app". Once you tap on it, it opens up a page with 3 icons. A facebook icon, a gmail icon and a hotmail icon. Now tap your finger on the gmail icon and instantly your gmail opens up withing "Kwesi's app" and you have full access. There is also a button in the top left corner that says "Main Menu". Once you tap the "Main Menu" icon, you go back to the three icons and can now rinse and repeat.
I hope this example is clear enough.
The question I seem to be coming back to is, would it be possible having an application that embeds or links you to other apps in that manner? I can only guess that it'd be really weird since they'd have to be installed seperately on your phone but I don't want that. I want one app that can handle an already set amount of apps within itself as the above example shows.
Thank you very much for reading and any thought would be very much appreciated.
/Kwesi
No, that is not possible in iOS for security reasons. But you have the following choices to modify your idea:
Register a protocol for the app : This will allow you to send data between applications using protocols. However, if the app wasn't made by you and doesn't have a protocol, then you can't use it.
Using this idea, it is possible to open an application. For example, opening Facebook with "fb://" or evernote with "evernote://". I am sure there are other applications that have these protocols. Just be aware that you don't have control on the application in this case. You can only open it and send data to it.
Since your example was about Facebook, Gmail. Then I would suggest using their corresponding API and build everything in your application. Many famous applications provide APIs for a fee or free usage. You have to check with each one separately.
I have a daily quote that I post on my wordpress blog each and every day. I want to make an iOS app for my subscribers so that they can get the daily quote on their mobile devices and also be able to save their favorites, etc.
Originally, my plan was to use the RSS feed of the wordpress blog. However, I don't really like the way this would work. I would rather be able to send the quote directly from my computer (or iPhone) and have it be "pushed" to my users. Right now my blog has over 450 posts. I want my users to have access to all past posts, and it seems like a slow way of going to have my RSS feed set to show that many posts.
I don't have any experience in this sort of thing. All my developer experience is in game dev and I could really use some help figuring this out. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
There's a sample project for getting and reading and RSS feed. That would be a good place to start. Once you understand the basics of iOS programming and design, then you could considering using the APNS (Apple Push Notification Services). That feature (fairly complex) allows you to push your quote on screen. But if you quote is too long, that might not make any sense.
But your first step is to get your feet wet and get up to speed with iOS development. Give yourself a few weeks for that at least.
Like for websites we have Alexa.com which show site analytics of the site and its rankings, etc.
Is there something similar for iPhone Apps?
Basically I want to know how successful an App is. I know we can guage it by seeing number of user reviews but at times there are not enough reviews and it becomes difficult to guage the success of that app.
We use appannie.com for our tracking... it's quite good.
All the datas are on your iTunesConnect account. However those datas are not always very clear. If you want nice charts, aggregation of reviews and rankings and several other stats about your applications, there are a lot of softwares that aggregates those datas.
I am using Prismo for instance, but there are several other applications that do the same thing (even web apps).
Localytics is good..
I am new to iphone stuff. After deploying an application in iTunes is there a way to find out the number of iphone/ipod touch which has installed / uninstalled this application ?
During uninstall the user is asked to rate the application, how to get that information with a developer license credentials ?
Apple tells you the number of sales (and the number of upgrades) in iTunes Connect. What they don't tell you is how many people have uninstalled your application or, more importantly, how many people are still using it n days after installing it.
You may be able to get this information (and more) using one of the third party analytic tools such as Flurry, although Apple has recently started to object to service like them. Another option would be to gather the same kind of information on your own server.
It would be really nice if Apple provided better information but, unfortunately, they don't at the moment.
All this data is provided through Apples iTunes connect site
https://itunesconnect.apple.com
Additionally you could subscribe to one of the support sites like
http://www.appfigures.com
which will give you nice graphs on sales etc
You should also take a look at Flurry Analytic's. Not only will it tell you how many unique devices it has been installed on, but you can add events as well. So lets say your app has a "Featured Listings" area or something like that. Flurry will log how many times people enter into the "Featured" area. It will help track conversion rates...
Also shows you the navigation path the user took. So they click on , "search", then they click on "homes", then they clicked on "featured"... yada yada yada... it provides excellent information.
If your app uses Core Location you can even see a dot on a map as to where the user was when they did all of this.
http://www.flurry.com/
-LT
The information provided by iTunes Connect is the number of downloads of your app. The ratings and reviews are actually not provided via iTunes Connect, but you can find it indirectly on the app store.
There are some services that aggregate all this information for you. A new one is www.appannie.com which shows you both downloads and ratings.
For number of installed Apple just updated https://itunesconnect.apple.com site you can adjust the date range in the middle of screen (using the slider) or by adjusting the dates on top left corner after navigating to sale and trends screen to see how many downloads you have had.
I'm trying to figure out if its possible for programmers to build an itunes client app for iphone or android where the user has the option to browse and listen to the song preview, something similar to this page: itunes link maker
I greatly appreciate any pointers or links in this direction
thanks
I would imagine your main problem is going to be legal rather than technical. The Apple Website's terms of use say:
Except as expressly provided in these Terms of Use, no part of the Site and no Content may be copied, reproduced, republished, uploaded, posted, publicly displayed, encoded, translated, transmitted or distributed in any way (including “mirroring”) to any other computer, server, Web site or other medium for publication or distribution or for any commercial enterprise, without Apple’s express prior written consent.
I'd be surprised if an iTunes Store Browser application passed Apple's approval process since the iPhone already has one and it's even more unlikely that Apple would let you use their content for an Android application.
Try this.
You'll notice that there is a field called "previewUrl". This gives the url to direct to for the preview of the song. It's not hard to play around with the link to generate content for whatever you're looking for. Make sure you've got an affiliate license first..... May as well make money out of any purchases.