A way to check if iOS app exists in App Store?

Question

I'm working on episodic game for iOS and would like to have a menu with links to all the episodes. When the menu is shown, I want to check if the episodes are available in App Store or not, and depending on the answer enable a button to take the user to the game's App Store page.

Is there any way of checking the existence of an app in the App Store?

All the questions I found were about checking if the user had INSTALLED certain other app on their device, but all I want to know is if it exists in App Store.

I already tried canOpenURL but that returned true for any App Store url such as http://appstore.com/nononondsds (Docs say "It does not guarantee that the full URL is valid.")

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

You can use Apple API as follows:

https://itunes.apple.com/search?term=Skype

Where "term" would be the search criteria. This will give you a JSON encoded result.

For full documentation you can check Apple Search API Hope this is what you're looking for.

Answer 2

Or you just need to your App's appstore URL to https://fnd.io/ and if it returns correct response mean your app is there on appstore

Answer 3

OK, first thing I'd do is listen to @AdamRichardson. It might be a better idea to release each episode as an in app purchase rather than a new app?

However, if you want to do your AppStore thing then I'd do it by having a server with data on it that you can inspect.

On the server have an API that returns a list of your Apps that are available on the app store.

This way you don't need to go to the app store to check you can just update your server.