Detect changed mappings and give a saner error

[Giszmo]

Google changes mappings more often than we would like and every time that happens, people flock to this issue tracker, open at least 5 issues and in the replies, the same questions repeat, too.

Google does these changes in slower or faster staged rollouts, so things at first just look glitchy (run twice and it works), then buggy (Run it ten times and maybe it works) and then completely broken.

We should

• Detect such unexpected api replies. If mappings don't match anything at all or if the type of nodes changed from number to string etc. ...
• Show an Error telling the user that maybe Google changed something
• Point the user to a document howToDealWithChangedMappings.md
• Document there to open an issue tagged mapping changed or a title "Mapping changed: ...", ideally with a title suggested by above error output to quickly detect duplicates
• Document how to figure out the correct mapping. I wonder how that would work, too. In fact this comment triggered me opening this issue.
• Document how to test ones changes locally
• Document how to use somebody else's suggested changes: "dependencies": { ... "google-play-scraper": "git+https://github.com/facundoolano/google-play-scraper#pull/545/head", ... }

[ansoncen]

I was thinking if Google has some sort of API that returns the app information when the app web page was loaded. When I inspect the source code and network request, I found those requests are quite nonsense to me.

[kufelkamil]

How do you feel about using the Android API instead? It requires login, but it hasn't changed since at least October of last year, likely much longer

Hi @89z, which Android API are you referring to?

[ansoncen]

these:

• https://android.clients.google.com/fdfe
• https://play-fe.googleapis.com/fdfe

Anywhere I can find the docs for these? Both return 404 when I open them in the browser.

[facundoolano]

can you check if this still happens with the latest version?