1. Download the app
When you need information about some apps, you can use a browser to obtain information from the official website.
Someone has analyzed the Protocol buffer format used by Google market and provided Java implementation.
To download the app, see: Android Market API. Note that Google may change the Protocol. Even so, it is of great reference value.
2. Obtain app Information
If you only need to obtain the app information, you do not need to download it. You can directly use the crawler to obtain information about the Google market. Someone has done this.
See: crawling the Android marketplace
By the way, this crawler'sCode,Androidmarketcrawler
3. Notes.
In step 2, the author obtained an app from the United States. Many of the crawler's search marks are in English. If you need to write a Chinese version, you need to modify the settings, or set it to the English version of the crawler.
In addition, although Google market already has around 0.5 million apps, the author only crawled more than 0.15 million. For details, see: 155,200 apps available from the US
4. Technologies Used
Use the python concurrent network programming library eventlet. For more information, see eventlet.
Parse the webpage. The author uses pyquery. Of course, you can also use beautiful Soup.
The obtained data can be saved as a file, sqlite3, or MongoDB.
Crawler. py: https://github.com/bionicspirit/AndroidMarketCrawler/blob/master/crawler.py