Use the Apple Search API to search by genre?

Question

Is it possible to use the Apple Search API to search by genre ? I'm thinking specifically games in the app store. Using Obj-c.

As has been pointed out in the comments of this question...

Search Apple App store by genre with iOS/Obj-c

There seems to be a problem with trying to search by genre, so I'm looking for answers which of examples of that actually working, not just links to the docs.

Answer 1

It's not actually documented on the Search API documentation, but you can add a genreId parameter to the search URL and it restricts the search to a particular genre.

If you look at the JSON returned from a search for "Yelp", there are 4 interesting things:

"genreIds":["6005", "6001"]
"genres":["Social Networking", "Weather"]
"primaryGenreName":"Social Networking"
"primaryGenreId":6005

Adding &genreId=6001 to a URL will find apps in the US in the "Weather" category. I'm using the search term "Check" in the URL.

https://itunes.apple.com/search?term=Check&country=us&entity=software&genreId=6001

Because it's not documented, you can't rely on it working forever. You may also be able to use the primaryGenreName as a parameter, I didn't try that. You'll have to figure out what numbers correspond to what categories too.

Answer 2

The Search API is documented here: http://www.apple.com/itunes/affiliates/resources/documentation/itunes-store-web-service-search-api.html

You can use this link to generate an RSS Feed of your liking. Without knowing too much about how you intend to use it, I would suggest looking at these two solutions and using the best one that suits your needs.