CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpscreen-scrapingitunesextract
brilliantairic
brilliantairic

Reputation: 836

iTunes App Store Web Scraping

I'm looking to have a user enter an app ID on a website, save the information from their app (my sql database), and then display that information on the website.

If anyone would mind sharing the code/process that would be used to do this or are there tutorials that you can point me in the direction of learning how to do this?

If you could help me out at all I will be very grateful. Thanks.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 4006

Answers (3)

calebus
calebus

Reputation: 21

If you want to save the information to your database then you might want to look at the program Appfetcher at http://www.altraware.com.

It uses the Xml that apple provides so there should be no legality issues.

Upvotes: 2

Chuck van der Linden
Chuck van der Linden

Reputation: 6660

You CANNOT do this via screen scraping. Read Apple's Terms Of Use

Your Use of the Site You may not use any “deep-link”, “page-scrape”, “robot”, “spider” or other automatic device, program, algorithm or methodology, or any similar or equivalent manual process, to access, acquire, copy or monitor any portion of the Site or any Content, or in any way reproduce or circumvent the navigational structure or presentation of the Site or any Content, to obtain or attempt to obtain any materials, documents or information through any means not purposely made available through the Site. Apple reserves the right to bar any such activity.

What you need to do is investigate Apple's Partner Program which includes a program for developers and I believe would grant you access to an API where you would be able to directly query for and receive the info you wanted (such as app descriptions) to display on your site and perhaps even get a commission for sales you generate when people purchase something from apple via links on your site etc.

Odds are that the other site you see which is displaying such info from Apple's store, has an affiliate/partner arrangement with apple. (and if not, it's just a matter of time till they get blocked from the site, find cease and desist letters in the mail from apple's laywers, get sued, or some combination of those three.

Upvotes: 6

PaulM
PaulM

Reputation: 3269

You should really look at these first.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/822380/how-legal-is-screen-scraping

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/396778/legalities-of-screen-scraping

Knowing Apple, they'll probably sue you. They have sued for less. Or IOW who haven't they sued?

Upvotes: 4

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