Now this is just ultra-handy; this nice “Ben” person has written a Perl script to go out and scrape all the Top 100 lists by category from iTunes App Stores around the world!
It’s been driving me crazy how slow iTunes can be when browsing through categories and switching between different countries to view the ranking for our Full Screen Web Browser in all the App Stores worldwide. I’ve had Erica Sadun’s article on Scraping AppStore Reviews in the back of my mind but never had the time to dig into it. Well, tonight I played around with this approach, using curl to pull back iTunes content for the top paid utility apps…
I wrapped this in a perl script which uses a regex to parse out the rank, app ID and app name from the XML that is returned. The list is filtered for the app ID in question and a loop iterates over all the App Stores around the world.
Let’s run it and take a look at how that latest application of ours is doing, shall we?
Poses Volume 1 Ranking in Category Photography:
New Zealand: 28
Singapore: 82
United Kingdom: 80
Finland: 39
Pakistan: 5
Osterreich: 84
Mexico: 84
Deutschland: 54
United States: 56
Poland: 29
Argentina: 52
Indonesia: 20
Well! That’s not too bad, is it now? Particularly in Pakistan. Apparently Pakistanis have the utmost taste and discrimination in their photography application purchasing choices!
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