So a while ago a i remembered one post from HN, it was some guy crawling google play store and keeping apps that were paid and people used them but had a low rating. He was selling this list, not sure if it was successful but i made something similar and updated
So far checking only 3 marketplaces, my crawlers found so far about 100k apps, the default filters show only the more interesting once (paid and low rating)
Its free.
I will add more and more marketplaces eventually. I will also try to add some social features, like "working as a team on some idea" and posting own ideas, but will see how it goes.
Feedback welcome
EDIT: i just see it on mobile, it does not look ideal. Will need to work on that hm.
EDIT2: just added pagination :), hope it works for you.
Can someone explain the value of such a list, am I missing something? Don't get me wrong, your project is neat and I enjoyed looking through it, but I don't understand how anyone would try to sell this or pay money for this.
I've never bought an app that was one-star, but over time many of the really useful apps I used were sold and did one-star kinds of things.
One app kept track of my car info (vin, insurance, mileage, fillups) and was useful. But one day it was sold - uploaded my data and put it behind a login.
"[but] did one-star kinds of things." That is a great line (seriously). I will probably end up working that phrase into something at one point, which is why I have this post bookmarked, so I can "hat tip to m463 on HN" when I do.
P.S. Do you remember the name of that auto app? Name and shame! ;-)
Another app I had that got worse was camscanner - a scanner app that would take a picture of a document and create a .pdf out of it.
It was sold to tencent. The "privacy policy" - when you could access it (broken links) was written in broken english that basically said it did anything it wanted with your .pdf files.
The kinds of documents I would image to .pdf were extremely sensitive personal documents - think w2, documents with SSN, etc...
At least apple notes eventually added a version of camera to .pdf (though it wasn't obvious how to use it when it came out)
Camscanner was one of my favourite apps! I had even paid for the pro version back before it sold. Then when it sold that actually meant nothing, and now I have a "pro" app that is useless essentially.
If anyone has good alternative suggestions I'm open, I haven't tried to look as I don't use it much anymore.
As an app developer, I spend a lot of time trying to find the right opportunities for apps to build. I'd happily spend $50 to cut down research time by a few hours.
I remember a story on Startup Podcast (by Gimlet media) about an atheist who looked at top 100 apps, and realized that there was an opportunity to build a better Bible app.
So, sometimes market research is very valuable. This risk you have for "solving problems you personally have" is that you can end up trying to build infra tooling like new databases.
The strategy is to take one of these apps and build a better version of it. The market demand is there, validated through purchases. But the market is unsatisfied with the current solution. So if you can build a better solution then you have a well defined valuable product
good question, i cant tell how many people did actually pay and when was the last time someone did. I guess its up to you to do the research further. One can at least often see when the last comment was posted.
Even if it is, it doesn't matter. The US Court of Appeals created precedent that allows for the scraping and aggregation of publicly published information with that LinkedIn case.
Is Apple’s iOS App Store “public” though? Ostensibly it’s only open to Apple customers with an iOS device: accessing App Store pages in a web-browser just redirects you to the App Store.
What consequences ? Breaking ToS can get your account suspended if you even need an account for doing this, not sure what else breaking the TOS really implies.
I don't know if Google can claim ownership of this data as it's customer generated and publically available.
Shouldn't that be caught by anti-trust laws? Google does not pay websites for scraping, so anyone should be entitled to scrap Google to their hearts content.
To be fair if being scraped were opt-in (Robots Inclusion Standard?) instead of opt-out, we might have a completely different technological world. Who knows.
Not exactly - robots.txt will prevent Google from crawling the page but it might still show up in search results (without a snippet or your page title) based on how others link to it.
You sound like you have a third opinion, one which would allow a website to appear on Google in response to user searches without Google knowing anything about what the website contains?
No, they are sarcastically indicating that you don't really have a choice, because if you aren't indexed by Google, practically speaking, you might as well not have a website.
In the US, there was a ruling a couple of years ago that gives some legal clarity to scraping data made publicly available (in favor of the scrapers) in the hiQ vs. LinkedIn case. You can read more about it here https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/09/victory-ruling-hiq-v-l...
This data is quite valuable and services like this aren't competing with these app stores. If anything, they are probably inviting more competition to the app stores resulting in better apps.
There is no reason for these companies to go after some small guy scraping the app store data. But who knows - Craigslist went after one man shops. These companies might too.
So far checking only 3 marketplaces, my crawlers found so far about 100k apps, the default filters show only the more interesting once (paid and low rating)
Its free.
I will add more and more marketplaces eventually. I will also try to add some social features, like "working as a team on some idea" and posting own ideas, but will see how it goes.
Feedback welcome
EDIT: i just see it on mobile, it does not look ideal. Will need to work on that hm.
EDIT2: just added pagination :), hope it works for you.