Get app-details from Google Play - api

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.

Answer 2

Android Marketing API is used to get the All app details from google store, You can check it out at here: https://code.google.com/p/android-market-api/

Answer 3

Unfortunately Google Play (previously known as Android Market) does not expose an official API.
To get the data you need, you could develop your own HTML crawler, parse the page and extract the app meta-data you need. This topic has been covered in other questions, for instance here.
If you don't want to implement all that by yourself (as you mentioned it's a complex project to do), you could use a third-party service to access Android apps meta-data through a JSON-based API.
For instance, 42matters.com (the company I work for) offers an API for both Android and iOS, you can see more details here.
The endpoints range from "lookup" (to get one app's meta-data, probably what you need) to "search", but we also expose "rank history" and other stats from the leading app stores. We have extensive documentation for all supported features, you find them in the left panel: 42matters docs
I hope this helps, otherwise feel free to get in touch with me. I know this industry quite well and can point you in the right direction.
Regards,
Andrea

Answer 4

The request might be blocked if using requests as default user-agent in requests library is a python-requests.
An additional step could be to rotate user-agent, for example, to switch between PC, mobile, and tablet, as well as between browsers e.g. Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge and so on. User-agent rotation can be used in combo with proxy rotation (ideally residential) + CAPTCHA solver.
At the moment, the Google Play Store has been heavily redesigned, now it is almost completely dynamic. However, all the data can be extracted from the inline JSON.
For scraping dynamic sites, selenium or playwright webdriver is great. However, in our case, using BeautifulSoup and regular expression is faster to extract data from the page source.
We must extract certain <script> element from all <script> elements in the HTML, by using regular expression, and transform in to a dict with json.loads():
# https://regex101.com/r/zOMOfo/1
basic_app_info = json.loads(re.findall(r"<script nonce=\"\w+\" type=\"application/ld\+json\">({.*?)</script>", str(soup.select("script")[11]), re.DOTALL)[0])
Check code in online IDE.
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests, re, json, lxml
# https://requests.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user/quickstart/#custom-headers
headers = {
"user-agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/106.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
}
# https://requests.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user/quickstart/#passing-parameters-in-urls
params = {
"id": "com.nintendo.zara", # app name
"gl": "US", # country of the search
"hl": "en_GB" # language of the search
}
html = requests.get("https://play.google.com/store/apps/details", params=params, headers=headers, timeout=30)
soup = BeautifulSoup(html.text, "lxml")
# where all app data will be stored
app_data = {
"basic_info":{
"developer":{},
"downloads_info": {}
}
}
# [11] index is a basic app information
# https://regex101.com/r/zOMOfo/1
basic_app_info = json.loads(re.findall(r"<script nonce=\"\w+\" type=\"application/ld\+json\">({.*?)</script>", str(soup.select("script")[11]), re.DOTALL)[0])
# https://regex101.com/r/6Reb0M/1
additional_basic_info = re.search(fr"<script nonce=\"\w+\">AF_initDataCallback\(.*?(\"{basic_app_info.get('name')}\".*?)\);<\/script>",
str(soup.select("script")), re.M|re.DOTALL).group(1)
app_data["basic_info"]["name"] = basic_app_info.get("name")
app_data["basic_info"]["type"] = basic_app_info.get("#type")
app_data["basic_info"]["url"] = basic_app_info.get("url")
app_data["basic_info"]["description"] = basic_app_info.get("description").replace("\n", "") # replace new line character to nothing
app_data["basic_info"]["application_category"] = basic_app_info.get("applicationCategory")
app_data["basic_info"]["operating_system"] = basic_app_info.get("operatingSystem")
app_data["basic_info"]["thumbnail"] = basic_app_info.get("image")
app_data["basic_info"]["content_rating"] = basic_app_info.get("contentRating")
app_data["basic_info"]["rating"] = round(float(basic_app_info.get("aggregateRating").get("ratingValue")), 1) # 4.287856 -> 4.3
app_data["basic_info"]["reviews"] = basic_app_info.get("aggregateRating").get("ratingCount")
app_data["basic_info"]["reviews"] = basic_app_info.get("aggregateRating").get("ratingCount")
app_data["basic_info"]["price"] = basic_app_info["offers"][0]["price"]
app_data["basic_info"]["developer"]["name"] = basic_app_info.get("author").get("name")
app_data["basic_info"]["developer"]["url"] = basic_app_info.get("author").get("url")
# https://regex101.com/r/C1WnuO/1
app_data["basic_info"]["developer"]["email"] = re.search(r"[a-zA-Z0-9_.+-]+#[a-zA-Z0-9-]+\.[a-zA-Z0-9-.]+", additional_basic_info).group(0)
# https://regex101.com/r/Y2mWEX/1 (a few matches but re.search always matches the first occurence)
app_data["basic_info"]["release_date"] = re.search(r"\d{1,2}\s[A-Z-a-z]{3}\s\d{4}", additional_basic_info).group(0)
# https://regex101.com/r/7yxDJM/1
app_data["basic_info"]["downloads_info"]["long_form_not_formatted"] = re.search(r"\"(\d+,?\d+,?\d+\+)\"\,(\d+),(\d+),\"(\d+M\+)\"", additional_basic_info).group(1)
app_data["basic_info"]["downloads_info"]["long_form_formatted"] = re.search(r"\"(\d+,?\d+,?\d+\+)\"\,(\d+),(\d+),\"(\d+M\+)\"", additional_basic_info).group(2)
app_data["basic_info"]["downloads_info"]["as_displayed_short_form"] = re.search(r"\"(\d+,?\d+,?\d+\+)\"\,(\d+),(\d+),\"(\d+M\+)\"", additional_basic_info).group(4)
app_data["basic_info"]["downloads_info"]["actual_downloads"] = re.search(r"\"(\d+,?\d+,?\d+\+)\"\,(\d+),(\d+),\"(\d+M\+)\"", additional_basic_info).group(3)
# https://regex101.com/r/jjsdUP/1
# [2:] skips 2 PEGI logo thumbnails and extracts only app images
app_data["basic_info"]["images"] = re.findall(r",\[\d{3,4},\d{3,4}\],.*?(https.*?)\"", additional_basic_info)[2:]
try:
# https://regex101.com/r/C1WnuO/1
app_data["basic_info"]["video_trailer"] = "".join(re.findall(r"\"(https:\/\/play-games\.\w+\.com\/vp\/mp4\/\d+x\d+\/\S+\.mp4)\"", additional_basic_info)[0])
except:
app_data["basic_info"]["video_trailer"] = None
print(json.dumps(app_data, indent=2, ensure_ascii=False))
Example output:
[
{
"basic_info": {
"developer": {
"name": "Nintendo Co., Ltd.",
"url": "https://supermariorun.com/",
"email": "supermariorun-support#nintendo.co.jp"
},
"downloads_info": {
"long_form_not_formatted": "100,000,000+",
"long_form_formatted": "100000000",
"as_displayed_short_form": "100M+",
"actual_downloads": "213064462"
},
"name": "Super Mario Run",
"type": "SoftwareApplication",
"url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details/Super_Mario_Run?id=com.nintendo.zara&hl=en_GB&gl=US",
"description": "Control Mario with just a tap!",
"application_category": "GAME_ACTION",
"operating_system": "ANDROID",
"thumbnail": "https://play-lh.googleusercontent.com/3ZKfMRp_QrdN-LzsZTbXdXBH-LS1iykSg9ikNq_8T2ppc92ltNbFxS-tORxw2-6kGA",
"content_rating": "Everyone",
"rating": 4.0,
"reviews": "1645926",
"price": "0",
"release_date": "22 Mar 2017",
"images": [
"https://play-lh.googleusercontent.com/yT8ZCQHNB_MGT9Oc6mC5_mQS5vZ-5A4fvKQHHOl9NBy8yWGbM5-EFG_uISOXmypBYQ6G",
"https://play-lh.googleusercontent.com/AvRrlEpV8TCryInAnA__FcXqDu5d3i-XrUp8acW2LNmzkU-rFXkAKgmJPA_4AHbNjyY",
"https://play-lh.googleusercontent.com/AESbAa4QFa9-lVJY0vmAWyq2GXysv5VYtpPuDizOQn40jS9Z_ji8HXHA5hnOIzaf_w",
"https://play-lh.googleusercontent.com/KOCWy63UI2p7Fc65_X5gnIHsErEt7gpuKoD-KcvpGfRSHp-4k8YBGyPPopnrNQpdiQ",
"https://play-lh.googleusercontent.com/iDJagD2rKMJ92hNUi5WS2S_mQ6IrKkz6-G8c_zHNU9Ck8XMrZZP-1S_KkDsA6KDJ9No",
# ...
]
A possible good solution with shorter and simpler code could be Google Play Store API from SerpApi. It's a paid API with a free plan.
The difference is that it will bypass blocks (including CAPTCHA) from Google, no need to create the parser and maintain it.
SerpApi simple code example:
from serpapi import GoogleSearch
import os, json
params = {
"api_key": os.getenv("API_KEY"), # your serpapi api key
"engine": "google_play_product", # parsing engine
"store": "apps", # app page
"gl": "us", # country of the search
"product_id": "com.nintendo.zara", # low review count example to show it exits the while loop
"all_reviews": "true" # shows all reviews
}
search = GoogleSearch(params) # where data extraction happens
results = search.get_dict()
print(json.dumps(results["product_info"], indent=2, ensure_ascii=False))
print(json.dumps(results["media"], indent=2, ensure_ascii=False))
# other data
Output exactly the same as in the previous solution.
There's a Scrape Google Play Store App in Python blog post if you need a little bit more code explanation.
Disclaimer, I work for SerpApi.