API call for user count in Chrome Web Store? [closed] - api

Question

Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
We don’t allow questions seeking recommendations for books, tools, software libraries, and more. You can edit the question so it can be answered with facts and citations.
Closed 4 years ago.
Improve this question
I have an extension in the Chrome Web Store and I like knowing roughly how many people are using it via the "N users" and ratings on its page.
However, I don't really like loading the whole "product" page just to see a couple of numbers and thought I'd try to make a little widget that would display it instead. However, I can't find any API documentation for the Chrome Web Store.
I would a call like /webstore/api/v1/appid.json to exist, but the closest things I've found in searching only concern the Licensing API.
Is there an official Chrome Web Store API for user metrics?

Answer 1

This is no such API.
You can use Google Analytics inside an extension to track users manually.
If you don't need anything fancy, just a number of installs and users, there is My Extensions extension, it will track those numbers for you.

Answer 2

Copy and paste the snippet below wherever you want in the body of a html document saved with a ".php" extension.
<?php
//URL of your extension
$url = "https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ddldimidiliclngjipajmjjiakhbcohn";
//Get the nb of users
$file_string = file_get_contents($url);
preg_match('#>([0-9,]*) users</#i', $file_string, $users);
$nbusers = str_replace(",", "",$users[1]);
echo $nbusers; //Display the number of users
?>

Answer 3

You can also do this client-side only (at least on your end) by using a cross-domain tool. This snippet will grab the number of users displayed on the Chrome webstore page for an extension (up-to-date as of April 28, 2018):
var chromeExtensionWebstoreURL = 'https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/background-image-for-goog/ehohalpjnnlcmckljdflafjjahdgjpmh';
$.getJSON('http://www.whateverorigin.org/get?url=' + encodeURIComponent(chromeExtensionWebstoreURL) + '&callback=?', function(response){
var numUsers = ((""+response.contents.match(/<span class="e-f-ih" title="([\d]*?) users">([\d]*?) users<\/span>/)).split(",")[2]);
console.log(numUsers);
});
In the future, Google may change the class name of the user count span, in which case you just need to update the regex appropriately.