Question

Based on the conversation here: Is there an API to get sales report on Google Play?

There may be a way to make an HTTPS Request (?) to google play to retrieve the download statistics programatically. I am trying to set up a program that runs everyday and downloads this information as a csv file.

Does anyone have an example of how to make the request and provide authentication?

Basically I want to download the information Andlytics provides in a csv

Answer 1

There is no API. The good news is that the new Google Play Console interface, now available to everyone, allows CSV export of all statistics.

Just for fun, here are some other pointers :

The Andlytics application is just doing a simulation of the browser and parses the JSON AJAX requests. It is open source, you can find all the code (in Java) here https://github.com/AndlyticsProject/andlytics

You can also do a basic console scraper using Rails and Selenium :

module Console
  require 'selenium-webdriver'

  def self.user_stats email, password
    login email, password
    stats = extract_stats
    extract_packages.each_with_index do |package, i|
      download = stats[i*2]
      install = stats[i*2+1]
      puts "#{package} - Downloaded #{download} / Installed #{install}"
    end
    quit
  end

  def self.init
    @driver.quit if @driver
    @driver = Selenium::WebDriver.for :firefox
  end

  def self.quit
    @driver.quit if @driver
  end

  def self.login email, password
    init
    @driver.navigate.to "https://market.android.com/publish/Home"
    element = @driver.find_element(:name, 'Email')
    element.send_keys email
    element = @driver.find_element(:name, 'Passwd')
    element.send_keys password
    element.submit
    sleep 10
  end

  def self.extract_packages
    packages = []
    @driver.find_elements(:xpath, '//div[@class="listingRow"]/table/tbody/tr/td/div/a').each do |e|
      if m = e.attribute('href').match(/^https\:\/\/market\.android\.com\/publish\/Home#ViewCommentPlace\:p\=(.*)$/)
        packages << m[1]
      end
    end
    packages
  end

  def self.extract_stats
    stats = []
    @driver.find_elements(:xpath, '//div[@class="listingRow"]/div/div/span').each do |e|
      if m = e.text.match(/^([0-9,\. ]+).*$/)
        stats << m[1].gsub(/[^\d]/, "")
      end
    end
    stats
  end

end

Just add the CSV/db stuff and a cronjob, it should work.