Easily scrape Apple App Store and filter results by categories for better insights

Introduction

Apple App Store is one of the most relevant app marketplaces in the world, with about one thousand new apps being published daily, it's very important to keep track of the trends in order stay competitive. However, building a solution from zero can be challenging, and introduce a new layer of complexity to your workflow. Though, you don't need to worry about building and maintaining your solution. Let SerpApi do all this work for you, so you can focus your time and resources in what matters most: analyzing the data in realtime and creating strategies to decide your app's future based on real data.

With SerpApi you can easily scrape Apple App Store, and even search apps based on their categories, or genres, such as Books, Business, Developer Tools, Education, Entertainment, Finance, Food & Drink, Graphics & Design, Health & Fitness, Lifestyle, Magazines & Newspapers, Medical, Music, Navigation, News, Photo & Video, Productivity, Reference, Social, Networking, Shopping, Sports, Travel, Utilities, Weather, and Games of different types, like, Action, Adventure, Casual, Board, Card, Casino, Family, Music, Puzzle, Racing, Role, Playing, Simulation, Sports, Strategy, Trivia, Word.

Let's walk through how we can use SerpApi to scrape all this valuable information with only a few simple steps:

Setting Up a SerpApi Account

First, we need to create a SerpApi account. SerpApi has a Free tier that offers up to 100 searches per month.
Let's head to the sign-up page to create an account. Provide a valid email and a valid phone number in order to access your account's dashboard.

Exploring Apple App Store

Now that you have an account, you can sign in and use SerpApi's Playground technology to explore Apple App Store search results.

The parameter term is required to search for apps. That's the parameter used to query for apps.
For example, by setting the term to clash, the results will have the term provided in the title or in some other field, such as release_note, or description.

There's a lot of information that is returned for each result, like: title, bundle_id, version, age_rating, release_note, minimum_os_version, description, release_date, latest_version_release_date, price, rating, genres, developer, screenshots, supported_devices, and more!

Though we can search all apps using a single API, it's important to mention that the results will differ based on which platform we're searching for. That is because Apple offer apps for different platforms:

• Setting the parameter device to mobile (default) will only return results from Apple's iPhone App Store.
• Setting it to tablet will return results from Apple's iPad App Store.
• Setting it to desktop will return results from Apple's Mac App Store.

We can also filter the app results based on the categories/genres by setting the category_id to the code associated with the desired category. Find the complete list of categories/genres and their codes in the documentation page for the Apple App Store.

Integrating SerpApi with your application

Exploring SerpApi's vast diversity of Search APIs using Playground is a lot of fun, but to get the most out of SerpApi's services it's best to use the results from Search Engines directly in your application programmatically.

In order to send requests to SerpApi, we will need your unique secret API key that can be copied right from your dashboard:

Your API key is unique to you and you should never share it anywhere to avoid other people using your account, but in case you accidentally expose your API key, you can easily generate a new one from the Manage API key page (if you generate a new API key, don't forget to update your application code with the newly generated API key).

Check out the documentation for SerpApi libraries based on the programming language you use:

• Ruby
• Python
• JavaScript
• PHP
• Go
• Java
• Dotnet

To demonstrate how simple it is to use SerpApi in your code, here's all you'd need to do to retrieve Apple App Store results from your application using the Ruby language, as you can also see in SerpApi's Apple App Store documentation page:

require 'google_search_results' 

params = {
  engine: "apple_app_store",
  q: "clash",
  api_key: "YOUR_SECRET_API_KEY"
}

search = GoogleSearch.new(params)
organic_results = search.get_hash[:organic_results]

That's all there is to it. Integrating SerpApi is extremely simple and straightforward. You can explore how to use all other Search Engine APIs offered by SerpApi at our documentation page, and play around with each of them using SerpApi's Playground feature.

Have fun! 😃