How to retrieve the list of top 1000 games in the iOS App Store in real-time

Question

I\'d like to retrieve the list of top 1000 apps (specifically games) in the iOS App Store in real-time. This information is public (at least the top 300), but Apple doesn\'t

Answer 1

There appears to be no documented public API, but you can (currently) still get at the data.

You can use wireshark (or similar) to figure out the URL sequences and the user agent that iTunes on a Mac or PC uses to get all the popularity sorted pages that it displays when manually clicking through the pages. It's all (currently) done in plain HTTP. You can get 100's of pages for many 1000's of apps this way. Then parse and decode the XML returned for these URLs to get the app names displayed on each page. A bunch of perl scripts driving wget or curl might work.

Note that the URLs, user agent and the format of the XML returned often changes when Apple updates iTunes. So you will need to periodically re-adapt your retrieval mechanism.