Overview

This script scrapes the App Store and finds out whether an app is featured on either the App Store homepage or in a specific category.

See the blog post for a longer description.

Usage

itFeatured.pl <numerical app ID> <category (Medical, Utilities etc.)> [iPhone | iPad]

If iPhone or iPad is not specified, it defaults to iPhone.

Example:

iTunesFeatured.pl 284940039 Navigation

The script's output is Tab delimited to make it easy to import it into other systems.

Columns:

• Date
• Country Code (2 letter, uppercase)
• Matches on the root level of the App Store
• Matches on the category level of the App Store

If the app is not featured, nothing is printed out.

Note: The script is rather slow. It has to spider 9 web pages per country, so it takes a long time. To improve this, it uses a parallel queue of 10 downloaders. If you run into issues, reduce the $max_concurrent_requests value of 10 in the script to something smaller.

If you use this script, I'd be glad to know. Just shoot me a tweet @futuretap.

Have fun!

License

Copyright 2010-2012 FutureTap. All rights reserved.

http://www.futuretap.com/blog/scraping-app-store-featured-entries/ http://www.futuretap.com/blog/revised-app-store-featured-entry-scraper/

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/