does anyone know where they all the information from for the site? i.e the icons, update information etc? it's obviously pulled down automatically from somwhere.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
appshopper etc.
- Thread starter iChan
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Arn should be able to tell us this.
I would also like to know the approx lag time from an updated/new app showing up in app store vs showing up on Appshopper.
Btw, I love that site - it's addicting.
iTunes its a website but it's restricted to an iTunes user agent so all you have to do is fake being itunes and you can scape the iTunes directory. I've been doing it for a few weeks so I have all the data in a database(I can run queries on apps) and I update my DB daily but I could probably doing it hourly without much of an issue.
It depends on how that site does it, AppShopper is not part of Apple so they don't have the "official" data, they get it like all the other sites. If there are 10k apps that a lot of daily scraping...In my basic tests it took a while to download this(the Apple servers are slow) but I've written something that speeds it up...not sure what other sites do though.
I'm guessing most sites update daily or weekly so if an app changes prices/description it wont be accurate for a few days.
EDIT: never mind thought the feed at http://ax.itunes.apple.com/rss did apps but doesn't seem it does.