Is there an official API for the Google Play Store app?

Question

The Google Play Store app (aka. Android Market) has updated to have many cool features, even wishlist of apps.

I wonder if there is any official API to communicate with it, even intents. I wonder if people just looked at the log to see the intents, or that there is an official API to reach each page of the app.

Here are some examples of what such API might be able to let you do:

what would you do in order to add an app to the wishlist of the Google Play Store?
what would you do in order to go to the reviews of a specific app, or even go to the part where you write a review of it?
Is there a way to query the apps of a specific company there?
what about a query of apps that were installed in the past?

And so on…

Here are the URIs documented by Google: https://developer.android.com/distribute/googleplay/promote/linking.html — Jan Gerlinger, Aug 18 '12 at 09:03
this is nice , but they are all intents , what about querying info from within your app? is that possible? — android developer, Aug 18 '12 at 09:31

score 3 · Accepted Answer · edited Jan 14 '14 at 13:49

3

1 . what would you do in order to add an app to the wishlist of the google play?

You can't

2 . what would you do in order to go to the reviews of a specific app , or even go to the part where you write a review of it ?

You can open up the app's page on Google Play using Intent with the URL from the link at the bottom of this answer.

3 . is there a way to query the apps of a specific company there ?

At best, you can use the Search URL to display a list of a particular developers apps.

4 . what about a query of apps that were installed in the past ?

You can't.

Documentation.

edited Jan 14 '14 at 13:49

OrangeDog

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answered Aug 18 '12 at 09:11

Raghav Sood

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i see . about the wishlist , is it because it's a new feature , and nobody even know how to access it even as an end user? – android developer Aug 18 '12 at 09:34
It's because the Play Store has no real API as such. They just have a few URL schemes you can use to display data within the Play Store itself. – Raghav Sood Aug 18 '12 at 09:36
do you know how to get to the wishlist ? maybe they have an intent for this too. – android developer Aug 18 '12 at 09:37
If there is such an Intent, then there is no documentation for it, so no. I doubt anybody know that. – Raghav Sood Aug 18 '12 at 09:39
End user questions should go on http://android.stackexchange.com – Raghav Sood Aug 18 '12 at 09:51
you don't understand . if you open it as an end user , you might be able to read from the logs in order to know what is the needed intent for it. – android developer Aug 18 '12 at 10:14
You'd have to try that yourself. I can't open the wishlist in my country. – Raghav Sood Aug 18 '12 at 11:32
i have a question regarding the google play : is it possible to get which version build of the current app is on google play ? – android developer Aug 19 '12 at 12:31
Not through Google Play. You could store the version code etc. in a text file on your server and read it from your app. – Raghav Sood Aug 19 '12 at 12:33

score -2 · Answer 2 · edited Jun 07 '23 at 09:20

Another unofficial API that you can try is also check out: www.playstoreapi.com

It's unofficial but easy to use (free for non commercial use) and it has a lot of nice features like search and top charts. from their documentation section:

Node.js:

var request     = require('request');
var apiKey      = 'wij5czxu3mxkzkt9'; // your API key
var packageName = 'com.whatsapp';     // package Name, e.g. com.whatsapp for WhatsApp

var url = 'http://api.playstoreapi.com/v1.1/apps/' + packageName + '?key=' + apiKey;

request({
    url: url,
    json: true
    }, function (error, response, body) {
    if (!error && response.statusCode === 200) {
        console.log(body) // Print the json response
    }
});

HTML/JS:

<html>
<head>
<body>
<p></p>
<script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.11.0/jquery.min.js"></script>

  <script>

  var apiKey = 'wij5czxu3mxkzkt9'; // your API key
  var app    = 'com.whatsapp';     // package com.whatsapp for WhatsApp

  var url = 'http://api.playstoreapi.com/v1.1/apps/' + app + '?key=' + apiKey;

  $.getJSON(url).done(function(appDetails) {
    $('p:last').html(JSON.stringify(appDetails));
  });

  </script>
</body>
</head>
<html>

Python:

import urllib2
import json

packageName = 'com.whatsapp'      # package com.whatsapp for WhatsApp
apiKey      = 'wij5czxu3mxkzkt9'  # your API key

url = 'http://api.playstoreapi.com/v1.1/apps/{0}?key={1}'

response = urllib2.urlopen(url.format(packageName, apiKey))

data = json.load(response)   
print data

C# .NET:

string apiKey = "wij5czxu3mxkzkt9"; // your API key
string app    = "com.whatsapp";     // package com.whatsapp for WhatsApp

string url = "http://api.playstoreapi.com/v1.1/apps/{0}?key={1}";

using (var webClient = new System.Net.WebClient()) {
    string jsonString = webClient.DownloadString(string.Format(url, app, apiKey));
}

Nice, but it costs money and needs registration. and I don't know if they have Java support (though it's weird since that's the most common thing to use on Android). — android developer, Apr 17 '14 at 11:32
it's a REST API, you can consume it anyway you like (just perform a GET request using your favourite programming language and you are set). it does require registration but from what I can gather it's free for non-commercial use. — orcaman, Apr 18 '14 at 12:17
Does "non-commercial" include free apps and/or donation based apps, and/or ad-based apps? — android developer, Apr 18 '14 at 13:04
I think that usually non-commercial use means that you are not going to be making money off this thing in a direct way (either by selling it or by displaying ads or something like that) — orcaman, Apr 19 '14 at 10:54
Note: the link in this answer doesn't work (redirects to the play store). — Zack, Feb 23 '16 at 04:44

Is there an official API for the Google Play Store app?

2 Answers2

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