CODEWITHSUNDEEP
app-storeweb-scrapingitunes
user700774
user700774

Reputation: 798

App store review scraping no longer working

Like many others, I've used the general guidelines at http://blogs.oreilly.com/iphone/2008/08/scraping-appstore-reviews.html (as well as the comments) to build a script to scrape app store reviews. The details in the comment by "Steve" on May 8th, 2011 has been working fine for me for a few weeks now, and evidently has been working for many people since this time.

As of a few days ago though, all of a sudden, this no longer works. I know Apple are slowly deprecating old versions of iTunes and therefore also these methods of accessing them. But what is the new way to retrieve this information?

So for the record I'm using:

This recently worked but now no longer does.

The test of success is that this test request (for the Netflix app in the US) should work from the command line: curl -A "iTunes/9.2 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X 10.6)" -H "X-Apple-Store-Front: 143441-1" 'http://ax.phobos.apple.com.edgesuite.net/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewContentsUserReviews?id=284222807&pageNumber=0&sortOrdering=2&type=Purple+Software'

Any ideas?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 3441

Answers (2)

knokknok
knokknok

Reputation: 86

replacing http://ax.phobos.apple.com.edgesuite.net with https://itunes.apple.com worked for me...

Upvotes: 7

hotpaw2
hotpaw2

Reputation: 70733

That URL was derived from using something like wireshark to inspect the HTTP requests that a very old version of iTunes made. This inspection needs to be redone for newer versions of iTunes, which may use HTTPS instead.

Upvotes: 1

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