App Store scraper API
An App Store scraper API that searches Apple's store or resolves a list of app ids, bundle ids and store URLs — returning title, developer, category, rating and review count, price, version, release and update dates, content rating, size, icon and screenshots.
$0.0008 per delivered app · $2 free every month · Failed runs never billed
$ curl $QD/app_store_apps/run \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $QD_API_KEY" \
-d '{"term": "podcast player", "country": "us", "max_results": 20}'
{ "status": "done", "count": 20,
"results": [
{
"app_id": "…",
"bundle_id": "…",
"title": "…",
"developer": "…" } ],
"cost": 0.016 }
# 20 apps × $0.0008 · nothing delivered, nothing charged
What an App Store scraper API does
Apple publishes the store itself as a plain JSON endpoint, which makes this the cheapest kind of data we sell: no key, no browser, no HTML to parse, and a whole result set in one round trip.
Because the source is Apple's own, the fields are exactly what the store believes today — including the current-version rating alongside the all-time one, which is the pair that tells you whether a recent release went well.
What one app looks like
Every delivered app carries these fields. Nullable means the source did not publish it — the field stays empty instead of being guessed.
| Field | Type | What it holds |
|---|---|---|
rank | integer | 1-based position. |
app_id | string | Apple app id. |
bundle_id | string · nullable | Bundle identifier. |
title | string | App name. |
developer | string · nullable | Seller/developer. |
developer_url | string · nullable | Developer URL. |
category | string · nullable | Primary genre. |
categories | string[] | All genres. |
rating | number · nullable | Average rating (all versions). |
reviews | integer · nullable | Rating count. |
rating_current_version | number · nullable | Average rating for the current version. |
price | number · nullable | Numeric price (0 = free). |
price_formatted | string · nullable | Price as shown. |
currency | string · nullable | Currency code. |
version | string · nullable | Current version. |
released_at | string · nullable | First release date (ISO). |
updated_at | string · nullable | Current version release date (ISO). |
content_rating | string · nullable | Age rating. |
size_bytes | number · nullable | Download size in bytes. |
icon | string · nullable | Icon URL (512px when available). |
screenshots | string[] | Up to 5 screenshot URLs. |
description | string · nullable | Store description (trimmed). |
url | string | Store URL. |
Inputs
The whole request. Anything you leave out falls back to the default shown in the catalog.
| Input | Type | Required | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
term | string | no | What to search in the App Store. Omit when passing app_ids. |
app_ids | array | no | Numeric app ids, bundle ids (com.spotify.client) or store URLs. |
country | string | no | ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code — picks the local site AND the proxy exit (default us). |
lang | string | no | Interface language (hl), e.g. en, it, de. |
max_results | integer | no | How many apps to deliver at most (1–200). You pay only for delivered apps. |
Pricing
App Store scraper API pricing
$0.0008 per delivered app. A run that delivers nothing costs nothing: blocked pages, challenges and retries are on us, and the $2 monthly allowance covers about 2,500 apps before you spend anything.
Pay as you go
- $2 free credit / month
- 60 requests / min
- List unit prices
Starter
- $15 free credit / month
- 300 requests / min
- 10% off unit prices
Growth
- $50 free credit / month
- 600 requests / min
- 20% off unit prices
Scale
- $250 free credit / month
- 1,200 requests / min
- 30% off unit prices
Same wallet, same key and same $2 monthly allowance as every other Data API. Prices are launch pricing read live from the billing config — GET /v1/scraper/collectors returns the price your key actually pays.
Integration
One POST, typed rows
Base URL https://api.quanticdata.io/v1, Bearer auth, the same key as every other Data API. Endpoint: POST /v1/.
curl -X POST https://api.quanticdata.io/v1/scraper/collectors/app_store_apps/run \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $QD_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"term":"podcast player","country":"us","max_results":20}'
What people build with the App Store scraper API
Three shapes of work this endpoint was designed around.
App market research
Search a category and rank the field by rating and review count.
Release monitoring
Track version and update date for a watchlist of apps.
ASO benchmarking
Compare titles, categories and screenshot counts across competitors.
App Store scraper API versus rolling your own
The differences that actually cost time when you build this in-house.
| DIY scraper | This collector | |
|---|---|---|
| Auth | Scraping the web store with proxies | Apple's public store endpoint |
| Ratings | All-time only | All-time and current version |
Your own apps, or everyone else's
App Store Connect is for managing apps you publish: submissions, TestFlight, your own sales reports. It says nothing about anyone else's app, which rules it out for competitive datasets entirely.
Apple does expose a public store lookup endpoint, and it is generous — a whole result set in one response, which is why this collector is a tenth of the price of the Play equivalent. What a dataset needs on top of it is storefront coverage without per-IP rate limits and a typed schema over a response where fields are omitted rather than nulled.
Limits, storefronts and the legal bit
Up to 200 apps per run, the highest cap among the app-store collectors. Coverage means storefronts as much as apps: the App Store is a set of national catalogues with different apps, prices, currencies and ratings. Throughput is your plan's rate limit rather than anything about the collector: 60 requests/minute on pay-as-you-go, up to 1,200 on the top tier.
Keep rating and rating_current_version as separate columns. The gap between all-time and current-release sentiment is the most informative number on the page, and averaging them destroys it.
Collecting publicly visible data is generally lawful in most jurisdictions, and courts have repeatedly declined to treat reading a public page as unauthorised access. Apple's terms restrict automated access, and icons, screenshots and descriptions are the developer's copyrighted material. None of this is legal advice — get some for your actual use case.
Can I look up by bundle id?
Yes. app_ids accepts numeric ids, bundle ids such as com.spotify.client, and full apps.apple.com URLs; ids that Apple does not know come back under failed.
Which country's store is queried?
country selects the storefront, so prices, availability and ranking match that market.
Is there a free App Store scraper API?
Every account gets $2 of credit every month with no card, which is about 2,500 delivered apps on this endpoint at $0.0008 each. It renews monthly, and a run that delivers nothing is never billed — so a failed or blocked attempt does not eat the allowance.
How much does one run cost?
Multiply the rows you actually receive by $0.0008. A run capped at 200 apps — the maximum for this collector — costs $0.16 if every row comes back, and less when the source has fewer. Volume tiers take up to 30% off, and GET /v1/scraper/collectors returns the price your key actually pays.
Why is it cheaper than the Google Play collector?
Because Apple answers a whole result set in a single response while Play requires one page fetch per app. The price difference is the fetch count, not a judgement about the data.
Can I search and look up ids from the same endpoint?
Yes. Pass term to search the store or app_ids to resolve known apps — numeric ids, bundle identifiers and store URLs are all accepted, which means a mixed list from an existing database goes in unmodified.
Run the App Store scraper API now
$2 of free credit every month, no card. Your key returns its own prices from GET /v1/scraper/collectors.