biais.org

I was looking for statistics about iPhone applications and raw data to extract my own statistical data. After a quick googling, I didn't found any way to crawl the App Store easily, so I tried to do it quickly.

Each application data is accessible via HTTP on this url: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=FIXME-ID where FIXME-ID is a number indetifying an application. To make an HTTP request on this url, you have to fake the User-Agent (iTunes/9.0.2 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.5.8) AppleWebKit/531.21.8 works).

With theses informations you can write this kind of shell script to brute crawl the App Store:

OUT=downloaded
ENDID=337489918
CURDIR=0
WGETMAX=40
mkdir -p $OUT/$CURDIR
cd $OUT/$CURDIR

i=$ENDID
while [ $i -ge 0 ]; do
    if [ $((i % 25)) -eq 0 ]; then
	CURDIR=$(($i / 10000))
	if [ ! -d ../$CURDIR ]; then
	    mkdir  ../$CURDIR
	fi
	cd ../$CURDIR
	# Limit the maximum number of wget process
	nwget=$(ps auxxwww|grep "wget"|grep apple|grep -v grep|wc -l)
	if [ $nwget -ge $WGETMAX ]; then
	    sleep 1
	    continue
	fi
    fi
    i=$(($i-1))
    echo $i
    wget "http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=$i&mt=8" \
            -U "User-Agent: iTunes/9.0.2 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.5.8) AppleWebKit/531.21.8"\
            > /dev/null 2> /dev/null && if [ $(\ls -l "viewSoftware?id=$i&mt=8"|tr -s " "|cut -d " " -f 5) -le 5000 ];\
            then rm -f "viewSoftware?id=$i&mt=8"; fi  &
done

My first iPhone game has been accepted in the Appstore. I worked on it during february 2009 and I stopped because of lack of motivation and lack of graphic design talents ;). Recently, I took 2 full days to work on it, I polished some things (sounds and online high scores) and decided to submit it for free. A few days ago, Apple sent me an email telling me that the game was downloadable in the Appstore.

Here is a short video of the game: