Scraping the mac app store

Question

I've been wondering if this is possible? I know Apple has made it hard, but is it really impossible?

All the apps have an id, which you can use to find the website for the app - https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/clear/id504544917 - but I can't seem to figure out how to get a list of these id's. Any suggestions?

All the apps are listed in the Mac App store (the app on your mac). Would it be possible to scrape information from there somehow? How would one go about that?

Let me know if this is totally impossible.

Answer 1

Apple actually provides an RSS feed generator for apps. You could write a script to request the feeds and builds data based on the results. Might not be 100% what you're looking for, but seems like a good place to start. Its a tool provided by Apple, and its public information so you shouldn't have any issues.

IDs are in the feed. Here is something I pulled from the top 10 paid business mac apps:

<id im:id="546392952" im:bundleId="com.creaceed.mas.prizmo2">

iTunes RSS Feeds

Answer 2

The iTunes, App Store, iBookstore, Mac App Store affiliate program offers a dump of the meta data for every piece of content in the store. This is updated weekly, then daily incremental changes are published.

Read more about the Enterprise Partner Feed (EPF) here:
http://www.apple.com/itunes/affiliates/resources/documentation/itunes-enterprise-partner-feed.html

If you want every adamID from the Mac App Store, this file will have it.