New AppInfo Tag

In a perfect world where I could pay web and back end developers in high fives, we'd already have this. Unfortunately, it's a project with a scope that's far beyond what we'd ever do for a "Oh hey, that's neat" feature. Long story short, the reason we're able to have that here is because Apple provides a nice API for us to pull iOS app data from iTunes.

To simplify it, AppShopper serves as our back end for everything, and the easiest way to imagine it is AppShopper calling up the App Store on the phone. AppShopper asks, "Hey Apple, have any new games?" and the App Store responds "I will list them for you!" with every listed item coming through the phone the exact same way. Google Play doesn't have this. To create a similar database for Android we'd need to use things called "scrapers."

So, while an API is like a easy to follow conversation, scrapers basically work by loading web pages and making assumptions that the same data is always going to be in the same place. An example would be if you wanted to build a scrapbook of food photos, so you built a robot that opened the newspaper and cut out the first photo of the food section. You make the assumption that it's going to be food, but since there's no standardization agreement with the newspaper like our phone call example, it could be anything. Typically, once the works get gummed up on something like this it's a lot of effort to fix it.

Anyway, hope that makes some sense for non-technical people. Cliffsnotes essentially amounts to I'd love to do it but we're a small company and need to be as efficient as we can with where we focus our efforts when it comes to development projects as they're always expensive.