Appgravity: Android App Search Engine

The Android Market application on the phone uses an API to talk to the Android Market backend. You can call a tool that uses that API a scraper if you want, but "scraper" brings up the mental image of accessing a website, which this isn't.

Note: I am the developer who built Cyrket, which I believe was the first website to do exactly what AppGravity does. I no longer operate or keep Cyrket up to date, as honestly it was really painful to get the kind of accurate data I felt was required (I considered "missing one app" a serious serious bug).

This was especially true as Google kept tightening the screws on their rate limits, some incidents of which involved me getting a PM from someone on the Market team informing me that whatever new thing I was doing they had decided to fix. ;P

The best story of which, being the time I managed to figure out that their API had a requests/time limit, but not a queries/request limit: I managed to put together multi-megabyte large requests to their backends that scraped down tens of thousands of comments at once... it was epic.

I had been up for over a day straight working on that part of Cyrket; I deployed it, and immediately went to bed. An hour later the Market team tells me they got tons of red lights and error bells, and tracked it back to me. They put in a temporary hack, and then added a query/request limit. ;P

That temporary hack, near as I can tell, is a hardcoded "if user == Cyrket: return None". It is still there. If I log in as Cyrket to the Android Market on my phone I seriously am living in a world where no one comments on anything at all. ;P