Question

I have a few apps on the iPhone app store, and I have some questions about how my app description is available on third party sites. There are other websites that advertise and promote apps just like the app store, how do they get all the info? Is there some sort of RSS feed from Apple that I don’t know about?

I have also gotten a few emails from various app developing companies, offering their services, how did they get my info? Its obviously available in the app store, but they surely didn’t go through and just copy the email addresses of all the apps in the store.

I would like to find a way to get in touch with the iPhone developer community similar to how I have received emails as an iPhone developer.

Any thoughts or insights on all of these questions would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

They intercept the XML that iTunes exchanges with Apple’s servers and reverse engineer the content. Two good articles describing how this is done can be found at:

• http://www.mobileorchard.com/app-store-data-mining-techniques-revealed-part-1/
• http://www.mobileorchard.com/app-store-data-mining-techniques-revealed-part-2-scripting-app-store-xml-downloads/