Google Play Store Javascript API

Retrieves applications metadata from Google Play Store product detail page trought NodeJS

Why?

When i was working on https://github.com/meetsapp/SmartAppBanner, i thought it will be cool to have support for Android Banners also but i've found quite hard to get the desired metada from Google Play Store with non-official libraries based on Python or Java, as i don't know a bit about these languages.

That's why i've created a small NodeJS server that exposes Google Play Store applications metadata in JSON format that also can be accessed for any client/server side script

How?

Requests routed to /app/:appid crawls the Goole Play Store product detail page (given an appid) by DOM traversing with cheerio. Then we assemble a JSON output by using the same syntax format as the iTunes API http://www.apple.com/itunes/affiliates/resources/documentation/itunes-store-web-service-search-api.html#searchexamples

The server responds to any GET request (yes, also CORS with client-side Javascript)

Live example

http://googleplay-jsapi.herokuapp.com/app/:appid

Where :appid is your application package id, i.e:

http://googleplay-jsapi.herokuapp.com/app/com.meetsapp

Running local

npm install

node index.js or foreman start

Running on Heroku (Live deploy)

1/ Create project on Heroku

2/ Pick the Git URL of the project and add it as new Git remote

git remote add heroku git@heroku.com:project-name.git

3/ Push the code

git push heroku master

4/ Ensure the app is running (you may need to instal Heroku CLI)

heroku ps:scale web=1

More info https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/getting-started-with-nodejs#prerequisites

Similar libraries

Python: https://github.com/androidtweak/Google-Play-REST-API/

Java: https://github.com/Akdeniz/google-play-crawler

To do

• Add new scrappers for providing access to searches or other products types