Ranking

App ranking informations can be get from iTunes RSS feeds provided by Apple, currently, at most Top 300 are listed in each feed.

For example, if I want the top 300 grossing apps in “Games” category, after input my requirements, I get the feed URL as follows:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/rss/topgrossingapplications/limit=300/genre=6014/xml

Using python, I chose feedparser as an RSS parser.

    feed = feedparser.parse(
        'https://itunes.apple.com/us/rss/topgrossingapplications/limit=300/genre=6014/xml')
    rank = 0
    for entry in feed.entries:
        rank+=1
        print str(rank), entry['title']

Then, we get the ranking list:

    1 Candy Crush Saga ® - King.com Limited
    2 Clash of Clans - Supercell
    3 MARVEL War of Heroes - Mobage, Inc.
    4 Hay Day - Supercell

    ...

    297 Overkill 2 - Craneballs Studios LLC
    298 Earn to Die - Not Doppler
    299 Extreme Road Trip 2 - Roofdog Games
    300 Lords & Knights - Medieval Strategy MMO - XYRALITY GmbH

Reviews

In the iTunes RSS feeds, we can’t find how to get the App reviews, but actually, it has, someone made a little guess.

For example, one could get App’s most recent reviews from below feed, by specifying the App ID (535886823) and store country:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/rss/customerreviews/id=535886823/sortBy=mostRecent/xml

    feed = feedparser.parse(
        'https://itunes.apple.com/us/rss/customerreviews/id=535886823/sortBy=mostRecent/xml')
    rank = 0
    for entry in feed.entries[1:]:
        rank += 1
        print '****** review %d ******' % rank
        print 'title: %s' % entry['title']
        print 'content: %s' % entry['content'][0]['value']
        print 'author: %s' % entry['author']
        print 'rating: %s' % entry['im_rating']

Pay attention, the first entry of this feed is the App description, not reviews.

Result:

    ****** review 1 ******
    title: Ahhhhhh
    content: Ahhhhhh
    author: Andrew288195Az
    rating: 1
    ****** review 2 ******
    title: Perfect except
    content: I still have to switch to safari to "Ctrl+F" a web page.

    Seriously?
    author: SarahTimmins
    rating: 1
    ****** review 3 ******
    title: Crashes too much
    content: Title pretty much says it all.
    author: RoboWarriorSr
    rating: 2
    ****** review 4 ******
    title: My penis is big
    content: I have a penis of 1 feet
    author: Jiackfabri
    rating: 5

    ...

    ****** review 49 ******
    title: Works great!
    content: I was skeptical but I actually really like this browser. Good job Googlé.
    author: eSquish
    rating: 5
    ****** review 50 ******
    title: Amazing
    content: This app/browser is fantastic! It runs fast, and efficient it has shown me the awesomeness that is google and convinced me to buy a chromebook
    author: Seandog247
    rating: 5

We can only get 50 reviews, but the feeds updated more frequently than the ranking feeds.

There are four types of reviews list,

    Most Recent
    https://itunes.apple.com/us/rss/customerreviews/id=535886823/sortBy=mostRecent/xml

    Most Helpful
    https://itunes.apple.com/us/rss/customerreviews/id=535886823/sortBy=mostHelpful/xml

    Most Favorable
    Most Critical

I couldn’t figure out what the feeds URL are of last two types, if anyone knows, please leave a comment, and I’ll update this post.

Code