We’re happy to announce today the release of a few new RSS feeds which provide a way to view activity in the Apple App Store without having to load up iTunes or the App Store on the iPhone yourself. The first two feeds are the most recent stream of new and updated applications added into the App Store updated hourly.
We just started aggregating this data yesterday so the updated application feed is only based off of applications we’ve seen updated since yesterday. This feed will grow as we discover more applications releasing updated versions. The links inside of both of these feeds will take you directly into the App Store. If you’re using NetNewsWire on the iPhone, you’ll need to click “Open in Safari” for it to work. Loading the feed directly in mobile safari and clicking will load the application in the App Store just fine.
Our next two feeds are updated nightly and show the top 100 list of free and paid applications and also their ranking as of when we updated the list the previous day. Like the previous two feeds, clicking the links inside the feeds will take you directly into the App Store.
Just like Pinch Analytics, we are releasing these feeds free of charge and they may be used however you’d like.
Cool. Any way you could add a description to the feeds?
Yup we’re working on aggregating that data now and will hopefully have that available in the feeds soon.
Wow! This is awesome. What a cool idea.
This is a great idea. I noticed that a game called Cube Runner was in the App Store at launch but is no longer there. Do you have any information on Apps that get the boot?
As part of the “Top 100″ feeds, could you publish a summary report that lists the top 100 in one entry?
Sure I’ll play around with it. I wasn’t sure while developing it how we should present the data through RSS but having one new item a day with the data is a good idea.
It would be great if you could pull at least the first screenshot as well. Just curious, where is the source coming from?
The new and updated application feeds have been improved to include the application description and also for the updated feed we include the updated text.
Jesse, thanks for adding the description!
Glenn – this is just us taking a bit of the data we’re using internally and making it public facing.
Following the suggestion from esd, the top 100 free and paid feeds are now showing one entry per day. Hope this didn’t cause any issues with anyone’s RSS readers changing the feed’s format so drastically.
Jesse – great work! When you say “Top 100,” I assume you/we are referring to “most downloaded.” Any way to determine “Highest User Ranking?” Thanks!
Thank you!
@Art The ranking is coming straight from the App Store ranking which I believe is most downloads in a certain time period. What that time period is I’m not really sure. Maybe someone at Apple could enlighten us on how exactly the ranking is calculated.
Could you add version number to the RSS feed? If its an updated version, the only way to know is by the version number!
Thanks for the RSS feed, this will be very useful!
@moo083 Sure I’ll take a look at including the version number in the feeds.
The New applications feed is returning error:
Bang! Kapowww! Krakkk!
(FeedBurner encountered an error while trying to bring you this feed and is now keeping its head down. Details follow.)
Feed Address: http://feeds.feedburner.com/RecentlyAddedIphoneApplications-PinchMedia
HTTP Error Code: 500
Detail: There was a problem retrieving the feed: java.net.SocketTimeoutException: Read timed out
Any chance of doing versions for the UK store?
@Anonymous – Yes, Feedburner seems to be giving us a bit of trouble at the moment. Hopefully it’ll be sorted out soon.
Hey everyone, it looks like feedburner is having some issues of its own right now. I would wait a bit and try to request the feed again.
The new feed is down
Feeds are running once again. Sorry for the initial hiccups.
This is excellent! These feeds will save me a lot of time counting “today’s” icons in the App Store, seeing if one has been added.
Thanks!
What am I doing wrong? I have loaded the feeds. When I click on an app that is listed, Itunes opens. I thought that the purpose, was so that Itunes would not open. What’s happening?
Wow, thanks a lot! This will make it a whole lot easier to track down new applications, and updates to existing ones!:-)
Any chance you could set up the equivalent feeds for the UK store as there are different availabilities there
I would love to see images added to these feeds to give us an idea of what the app looks like as well.
Brilliant though, well done.
Avaivable for the FrenchStore too ?
It’s possible ? Thanks
It would be nice to have also a “New free applications” feed… keep up the great work! Thx
Thanks for the feed!
THANK YOU very much!
This is EXACTLY what I’ve been looking for! Thank you!
Showing at least the first screenshot from the store would be really handy too.
Very useful. Thanks for putting this up and I second the request for images in the feed. That would make it so hard to visually identify an app easily while looking at the AppStore list.
Adding to the chorus… the addition of screenshots would be really appreciated.
@jethro (#4): According the developer, he took down Cube Runner after discovering a bug. He’s working on getting it back up.
http://andyqua.co.uk/CubeRunner/News.html
@SM Here you go, a new free application feed. http://feeds.feedburner.com/RecentlyAddedFreeIphoneApplications-PinchMedia
Can we get the date stamp in the feed? It’s not showing up for me…
Thank you very much!! Great work!
Time stamps are now in the feeds.
Thanks so much!
How are you getting this information? Some kind of backdoor? Apple doesn’t seem to publish this information anywhere that I can find. Surely for free you aren’t going through iTunes by hand and copying/pasting?
Never mind I found it
This is very cool – but how on earth did you do it? I’d like to build something like this for myself – but can’t find any information/APIs for accessing the store…
Just a FYI as a fellow itunes web scraper — Apple just changed their page and the all applications page doesn’t work.
It looks like Jaiku fixed theirs already, but mdimension, this one, and esp.eran.to are a bit behind.
Is the feed dead? no updates in 24 hours
Sorry about the broken feed guys. Apple changed their appstore data format a bit and as a result our scripts stopped pulling in new applications. The scripts have been updated now and the feeds should be updated now.
Also to deal with the issue with new applications not showing up in the feeds due to Apple back dating their release date, I’ve added a new script which will try to find all these missing applications. This also means though that there will be a bunch of older applications showing up in the new applications feed which were previously missed.
Longer descriptions in feeds, please.
GIA
Great job. Is there a way to look back further beyond the the the 100 most recent apps. I find at times, so many apps are added to the app store that I don’t see all the new apps the have been added in the last 24 hours. For example, now at 14:00 it only goes back to 04:56 the same day (ie only 9 hrs!
Thanks.
Please explain where and how you’re getting this data (via email is fine) as I’m seeking to use this date, and feel it would be inappropriate to use your feed (plus I have a slightly different purpose.) I’m not going to be generating a feed, I just need to be able to programatically look up applications in the app store.
I’m unable to find a page on apple’s site with the information.