How to scrape Google Play Apps with Node.js

❗❗❗ This blog post was written for an old Google Play page design. The code is currently broken due to a redesign of the Google Play website, we're currently working on a fix.

What will be scraped

Preparation

First, we need to create a Node.js project and add npm packages cheerio to parse parts of the HTML markup, and axios to make a request to a website. To do this, in the directory with our project, open the command line and enter npm init -y, and then npm i cheerio axios.

Process

SelectorGadget Chrome extension was used to grab CSS selectors.
The Gif below illustrates the approach of selecting different parts of the results.

Full code

const cheerio = require("cheerio");
const axios = require("axios");

const AXIOS_OPTIONS = {
    headers: {
        "User-Agent":
            "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/101.0.4951.64 Safari/537.36",
    },                                                  // adding the User-Agent header as one way to prevent the request from being blocked
    params: {
        hl: 'en',                                       // Parameter defines the language to use for the Google search
        gl: 'us'                                        // parameter defines the country to use for the Google search
    },
};

function getMainPageInfo() {
    return axios
        .get(`https://play.google.com/store/apps`, AXIOS_OPTIONS)
        .then(function ({ data }) {
            let $ = cheerio.load(data);

            const mainPageInfo = Array.from($('.Ktdaqe')).reduce((result, block) => {
                const categoryTitle = $(block).find('.sv0AUd').text().trim()
                const apps = Array.from($(block).find('.WHE7ib')).map((app) => {
                    return {
                        title: $(app).find('.WsMG1c').text().trim(),
                        developer: $(app).find('.b8cIId .KoLSrc').text().trim(),
                        link: `https://play.google.com${$(app).find('.b8cIId a').attr('href')}`,
                        rating: parseFloat($(app).find('.pf5lIe > div').attr('aria-label').slice(6, 9)),
                    }
                })
                return {
                    ...result, [categoryTitle]: apps
                }

            }, {})

            return mainPageInfo;
        });
}

getMainPageInfo().then(console.log)

Code explanation

Declare constants from required libraries:

const cheerio = require("cheerio");
const axios = require("axios");

Next, we write down the necessary parameters for making a request:

const AXIOS_OPTIONS = {
    headers: {
        "User-Agent":
            "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/101.0.4951.64 Safari/537.36",
    },
    params: {
        hl: 'en',
        gl: 'us'
    },
};

And finally a function to get the necessary information:

function getMainPageInfo() {
    return axios
        .get(`https://play.google.com/store/apps`, AXIOS_OPTIONS)
        .then(function ({ data }) {
            let $ = cheerio.load(data);

            const mainPageInfo = Array.from($('.Ktdaqe')).reduce((result, block) => {
                const categoryTitle = $(block).find('.sv0AUd').text().trim()
                const apps = Array.from($(block).find('.WHE7ib')).map((app) => {
                    return {
                        title: $(app).find('.WsMG1c').text().trim(),
                        developer: $(app).find('.b8cIId .KoLSrc').text().trim(),
                        link: `https://play.google.com${$(app).find('.b8cIId a').attr('href')}`,
                        rating: parseFloat($(app).find('.pf5lIe > div').attr('aria-label').slice(6, 9)),
                    }
                })
                return {
                    ...result, [categoryTitle]: apps
                }

            }, {})

            return mainPageInfo;
        });
}

Now we can launch our parser. To do this enter node YOUR_FILE_NAME in your command line. Where YOUR_FILE_NAME is the name of your .js file.

Output:

{
   "Popular apps & games":[
      {
         "title":"Netflix",
         "developer":"Netflix, Inc.",
         "link":"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.netflix.mediaclient",
         "rating":4.5
      },
      {
         "title":"TikTok",
         "developer":"TikTok Pte. Ltd.",
         "link":"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zhiliaoapp.musically",
         "rating":4.5
      },
      {
         "title":"Instagram",
         "developer":"Instagram",
         "link":"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.instagram.android",
         "rating":4
      }
      ... and other results
   ]
}

Google Play Store API

Alternatively, you can use the Google Play Store API from SerpApi. SerpApi is a free API with 100 search per month. If you need more searches, there are paid plans.

The difference is that all that needs to be done is just to iterate over a ready-made, structured JSON instead of coding everything from scratch maintaining, figuring out how to bypass blocks from Google, and selecting correct selectors which could be time-consuming at times. Check out the playground.

First we need to install google-search-results-nodejs. To do this you need to enter in your console: npm i google-search-results-nodejs

const SerpApi = require("google-search-results-nodejs");
const search = new SerpApi.GoogleSearch(process.env.API_KEY);     //your API key from serpapi.com

const params = {
  engine: "google_play",                                // search engine
  gl: "us",                                             // parameter defines the country to use for the Google search
  hl: "en",                                             // parameter defines the language to use for the Google search
  store: "apps"                                         // parameter defines the type of Google Play store
};

const getMainPageInfo = function ({ organic_results }) {
  return organic_results.reduce((result, category) => {
    const { title: categoryTitle, items } = category;
    const apps = items.map((app) => {
      const { title, link, rating, extansion } = app
      return {
        title,
        developer: extansion.name,
        link,
        rating,
      }
    })
    return {
      ...result, [categoryTitle]: apps
    }
  }, {})
};

const getJson = (params) => {
  return new Promise((resolve) => {
    search.json(params, resolve);
  })
}

getJson(params).then(getMainPageInfo).then(console.log)

Declare constants from required libraries:

const SerpApi = require("google-search-results-nodejs");
const search = new SerpApi.GoogleSearch(API_KEY);

Next, we write down the necessary parameters for making a request:

const params = {
  engine: "google_play",
  gl: "us",
  hl: "en",
  store: "apps"
};

Next, we write a callback function in which we describe what data we need from the result of our request:

const getMainPageInfo = function ({ organic_results }) {
  return organic_results.reduce((result, category) => {
    const { title: categoryTitle, items } = category;
    const apps = items.map((app) => {
      const { title, link, rating, extansion } = app
      return {
        title,
        developer: extansion.name,
        link,
        rating,
      }
    })
    return {
      ...result, [categoryTitle]: apps
    }
  }, {})
};

Next, we wrap the search method from the SerpApi library in a promise to further work with the search results and run it:

const getJson = (params) => {
  return new Promise((resolve) => {
    search.json(params, resolve);
  })
}

getJson(params).then(getNewsData).then(console.log)

Output:

{
   "Popular apps & games":[
      {
         "title":"Netflix",
         "developer":"Netflix, Inc.",
         "link":"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.netflix.mediaclient",
         "rating":4.5
      },
      {
         "title":"TikTok",
         "developer":"TikTok Pte. Ltd.",
         "link":"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zhiliaoapp.musically",
         "rating":4.5
      },
      {
         "title":"Instagram",
         "developer":"Instagram",
         "link":"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.instagram.android",
         "rating":4
      },
      ... and other results
   ]
}

Links

• Code in the online IDE
• Google Play Store API
• SerpApi Playground

If you want to see some project made with SerpApi, please write me a message.

Join us on Twitter | YouTube

Add a Feature Request💫 or a Bug🐞