How do sites like Apptism and Appbeacon build their list of apps from the AppStore? Is there some way to query the store and get information such as title, author, ratings, etc.?
They screen-scrape the html. This article may be helpful for you.
Several websites (such as Pinch) use this data to provide RSS feeds of different application categories and their associated information. Depending on your needs this may be an easier option.
There are also XML feeds of the App Store which includes category, release date, etc.
Here's an article that describes what's available and how to get at it.
Your View into the App Store
Some companies specialized in ASO services provide access to their underlying architecture. They scrape the stores to generate data for their SAAS products or consulting services. And they provide access to the data with API's (for a fee).
Examples include :
http://apptweak.io
https://developer.searchman.com/
Related
I just launched my personal website to advertise my services for front-end web development and digital art.
I'm looking into adding Schema.org structured data to the page but cannot find a list of organization/person types to use for a freelance/contractor.
Any insight on what Schema.org types I might want to include on my site for my specific niche?
I use http://schema.org/Person for this. You might want to consider http://schema.org/Corporation as well. Depending on how you want to market yourself. I.E. freelancer vs company.
I have an online store and I have added a Schema.org Website entity to its JSON-LD structured data. The store also has a brick and mortar store. So I was wondering whether it would be also appropriate to add a Store entity to the structured data?
Can the Website and the Store entity co-exist and would it be beneficial?
Additionally, Please add LocalBusiness schema - this will work better ;). As for Website, please check information about website enhancements.
Also, I would go to Google for schema docs, as not all structured data gives any result. Structured data influences on how your website looks like in search results. (Or how Search Engine shows information in the snippets).
Please check information for LocalBusiness at Google Developers portal. And it will be awesome if you add schemas for your products in the store, this will have a huge impact, I think.
I have created a few small apps for the iPhone so I have some experience. An organization that I'm in asked me if I could program a weekly newsletter app for them. I though it would be a good challenge so I agreed. My question is: how do I get the app to update weekly without the users having to re-download or manually update? Do I connect to a database or a website? Can anyone send me the link to a good tutorial? I wasn't able to find one.
Thank you!
Your question is very general but I could give you some suggestions.
First, you need to connect to a service that provides you news info. This is needed. The service could send you an xml that you can parse and display, for example in a UITableView. XML is not the only solution. You could use also JSON.
For parsing XML I suggest you to read GDataXML, while for JSON JSONKit framework. But there are also other valid framework out there.
Then, to save data it depends on what kind of data you deal with. Here you could find different ways to save your news. Save an XML that contains your news, serialize data and save them in the local filesystem or use Core-Data.
To update your news without user actions, you have to save the last time when the app has downloaded news (for example in NSUserDefaults) and each time time the application is "activated" check for that date and update news if necessary.
Out there there are plenty of tutorials on how to (in parenthesis I inserted classes or framework that you could have a look):
consuming web service on iPhone (ASIHttpRequest - no more supported, NSURLConnection class, AFNetworking)
dealing with XML file/data and theirs parsing (GDataXML, touchXML, etc.)
dealing with JSON messages (JSONKit, etc.)
managing documents (NSFileManager class)
using Core-Data
using Property-List and/or NSUserDefaults
First three cover the first step (download). Other three cover the second one (save). Obviously you have not to use all of them. For example a configuration could be:
NSURLConnection for service, GDataXML for parsing XML data and Property-List for save data.
Hope it helps.
A simpler approach would be to make it a pure web app and update the website weekly.
Your content providers are going to have to do those updates anyway.
Check: Adding Newsstand Support to Your App or Tutorial: How To Make Your App Work With The Newsstand
Is is possible to querying Amazon for items. Regarding their prices, discounts, category etc?
If yes then how can we access it and get results on iphone.
Any help would be appreciated.
Possibly you're looking for Amazon Web Services, specifically the Amazon Associates Web Service (A2S)? According to the wiki article you can use it to browse their catalog and retrieve product information etc etc.
You need the Product Advertising API
http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSECommerceService/latest/DG/
Use the ItemLookup operation to find the item in question. Depending on what ResponseGroup you choose, you can get just about every piece of information about a product.
I am wondering if the App Store provides an API that allows others to access the data like descriptions, prices, reviews, etc.?
The iTunes Store is the API.
All pages in the iTunes Store are simply XML files rendered by iTunes. You can parse these files yourself and navigate around to your heart's content.
Here's the URL for the front page:
http://ax.phobos.apple.com.edgesuite.net/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/com.apple.jingle.app.store.DirectAction/storeFront
You might also want to see:
http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/itms/
http://www.s-seven.net/itunes_xml
Apple has an official API for the App Store, it's named iTunes Search API. In the documentation there are also some examples on how to use the "lookup" and "search" endpoints, quite easy to use and data is returned in JSON format :)
Unfortunately that's not the same with Google Play (previously known as Android Market) which does not expose apps' meta-data through an API.
To get that data for Android, you could develop your own HTML crawler, parse the page and extract the app meta-data you need. This topic has been covered in other questions, for instance here.
If you don't want to implement all that by yourself, you could use a third-party service to access Android apps meta-data through a JSON-based API.
For instance, 42matters.com(the company I work for) offers a unified API for both Android and iOS, here more details:
https://42matters.com/app-market-data
The endpoints range from "lookup" (to get one app's meta-data, probably what you need) to "search", but we also expose "rank history" and other stats from the leading app stores. We have extensive documentation for all supported features, you find them in the left panel: https://42matters.com/docs/overview
I hope this helps, otherwise feel free to get in touch with me. I know this industry quite well and can point you in the right direction.
Regards,
Andrea