Our FileMaker database where we import rankings and featured entries for each day and country
News from our little tool to monitor the App Store for featured entries: Thanks to Dominik Wagner from TheCodingMonkeys, the script to scrape App Store Featuring entries gained a noticeable speed bump. Using multi threading it now completes in 16 seconds, down from 36 seconds!
The script detects the following featured entries and prints them in one line per country:
- TOP STAGE: App or Game of the Week, aka winning the lottery jackpot
- Home page: mentioned somewhere on the root level homepage, including the Top 10 rankings
- New and Noteworthy page: This is more or less identical to the home page. Depending on the country, the extra page may contain some more apps.
- What’s Hot page
- Any other page linked the same way (with selection box on the homepage)
- Category page: mentioned somewhere on the category page, including the Top 10 rankings
- Category “New”
- Category “What’s Hot”
How to call the script
To start the script you just need the iTunes ID of the app, the category and “iPhone” or “iPad” depending on which store you want to check:
./iTunesFeatured.pl 314785156 Navigation iPhone 09.08.2011 AE App Store: Home page, Staff Favourites Navigation: Home p… 09.08.2011 AR App Store: Home page, Staff Favourites Navigation: Home p… 09.08.2011 AT App Store: TOP STAGE, Home page Navigation: Home page
The output is structured as a tab-delimited text with columns for date, country, root level mentions and category mentions. This makes it easy to import the output into a spreadsheet, database or anything else.
Download iTunes FeaturedCheck on GitHub.
Update 07.11.2012: Fixed an issue after a recent iTunes change
2 Comments
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Ryan King
I changed the genreIDs to match music genres and changed cat to Music. this works and finds featured music but it defaults to the ALL genres and doesnt loop through all the genres I set in the array. if I manually set the fallback genre it will work for that genre. any ideas?
Ryan King
well, I got the genres to work by adding a foreach loop to loop through them. but script only works for US store fronts. cant get it to fetch homepages from other countries.