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Google Play API: getting app data without scraping

What Google offers, what it doesn't, and how to get listings, installs and charts for any app in a few lines of code.

What Google actually provides

Google has two official interfaces around Play. The Play Developer API lets you manage your own apps: upload releases, answer reviews, check purchases. The Play Console reports export your own installs and revenue. Neither returns anything about apps you don't own, and neither has search, charts or competitor data.

So every product that shows Google Play data for arbitrary apps (market research tools, ASO platforms, app directories, investor dashboards) gets it from the public store pages one way or another.

Three ways to get the data

  1. Scrape the store yourself. Open-source libraries parse the store HTML. It works for a few hundred apps; at scale you need proxies, retries and fixes every time the page markup changes.
  2. Buy a dataset dump. Good for one-off research, stale for anything live.
  3. Use a data API. Someone else runs the collection; you query an index with filters.

One request, one app

curl -H "X-API-Key: $API_KEY" \
  "https://apiplay.net/api/v1/app?id=com.spotify.music"

The answer has the title, developer, category, installs (the store label and an exact estimate), rating with its 1–5 histogram, price, ads and in-app purchase flags, version, minimum Android version, release and update dates, icon, screenshots and the time the record was fetched.

Lists instead of single apps

Most work is about sets of apps. /search filters the whole index: ?category=FINANCE&min_installs=1000000&sort=score returns well-rated finance apps with a million installs or more. /new?since=2026-10-01 lists releases, /removed lists apps that disappeared, /charts?country=DE&category=GAME_PUZZLE returns a chart.

Limits worth knowing