Is there an official documentation for the use of the App Store API?

Question

I may want to write an tool that makes some App Store statistical analysis, if that's legal. I am wondering if there is any offical documentation for how to access the App Store API with third party Software. Does anyone know?

Answer 1

No. There's no official API for doing that. In fact, Apple is usually very closed about its numbers, statistics and information in general.

What some people do do, to get some info on most downloaded apps, music and other iTunes store stuff, is to crawl the store and parse HTML content to get the numbers they want.