Is it possible to get the ranking position of any app with iTunes App store API?

Question

After did some research, I found that there are some websites( e.g. http://www.topappcharts.com) and Apps that can show rankings for a particular App. However, the graph is only showing the periods when the App's ranking is within top 200.

My question is whether there is some official API or non-official API that I can call to get the ranking position of my App (even it's position is about 500, 1000).

Or, query by page like iTunes AppStore display. page by page till find the target App, and calculate the position by pagex20+position within current page. Is it possible?

Thanks

Answer 1

Yes, it is currently possible to scrape the App store page by page using curl or wget to imitate the iTunes user agent and App store page request messages (which can be determined using something like wireshark). The result is a large page of HTML/XML with app names embedded. Multiplying the page where you find your app * 20 will give a position all the way down to the very bottom of the rankings. This can take awhile if your app is way down in the rankings (a fraction of an hour?).

This is not an official API, and thus Apple does change both the protocol and the format of the results from time to time (completely unannounced and with no public documentation), as well as many things being different for different versions of their iTunes application.