Get app-details from Google Play

Question

I am wondering how the various app statistics sites get app-details from Google Play. As GP does not have a public API. An example is Appaware.com - they have full details for Google Play apps.

A possible solution is scraping, however it doesn't work because Google will block you when you start sending hundreds of requests to them.

Any ideas?

p.s. "Google Play Developers API" is not a choice as it lets you access app-details only for your apps.

Answer 1

They use either the mobile API used by Android devices (i.e. with this library) or scrape the Google Play website. Both methods are subject to rate limiting, so they put pauses in between requests.

The mobile device API is completely undocumented and very difficult to program against. I would recommend scraping.

There is no official API or feed that you can use.