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Am planning to use iTunes Search API to get App related information - http://www.apple.com/itunes/affiliates/resources/documentation/itunes-store-web-service-search-api.html

Wanted to know if there is any pre-defined Rate/Throttle Limit on the API usage. Couldn't find any info related to this in their Documentation / Stack / Google.

Does anyone have info on this?

Kara
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Vivek Kondur
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3 Answers3

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Answering the original question:

The Search API is limited to approximately 20 calls per minute (subject to change). If you require heavier usage, we suggest you consider using our Enterprise Partner Feed (EPF). For more information, visit the EPF documentation page.

This is from iTunes Search API Documentation

jetpackpony
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I don't know what the exact rate limit is and couldn't find any info on this from Apple. But I can assure you that there must be a rate limit somehow since most of my requests on my server don't succeed, they result to an HTTP Status 403. The exact same requests work on other computers and sometime later (on retries) on the same server.

I have tried to find the limits by making a lot of requests concurrently on my development computer but no requests lead to the same error as on my server. My server makes several dozen thousands of requests per day at the moment (I'm fetching all links once for caching those) which leads to more than 90 % of the requests to fail – but some succeed.

Therefore I did as suggested by Ted Hosmann an contacted Apple for access to the EPF files. If you don't exceed more than – say – a dozen thousand of requests per day, I guess the rate limit shouldn't be a problem for you. That's the number of requests I tried on my computer concurrently without any problems. If you need more, you should use the iTunes Enterprise Partner Feed as well.

Jeehut
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  • Hi Dschee, do you know if the rate limit applies per device or per app. I have an app that have a lot of users. If the rate limit is per device, that's fine. If the rate limit is per app, then I have exceeded the rate limit and need to build my server with EPF? Please help with my question here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/41290585/is-itunes-search-api-rate-limit-per-device-or-per-app – John Dec 23 '16 at 08:33
  • I'm not sure, but quoting my own answer: 'The exact same requests work on other computers (...)' it seems it's a device-based (or IP-based?) limit. So, it'll probably be no problem for many different users in the wild. – Jeehut Dec 23 '16 at 10:02
  • Thanks Dschee, hope it's really device based. I could save from a lot of work building another server. Happy Holidays. – John Dec 23 '16 at 10:07
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If you are looking for a large amount of records, it might be easier to download the EPF file first - then supplement your updates using the lookup API:

https://affiliate.itunes.apple.com/resources/documentation/itunes-enterprise-partner-feed/

If you hit the Search or Lookup API aggressively, you may start to experience longer response times, greater than 30 seconds or failed responses.

jayp
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Ted Hosmann
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    do you know of another way to get rating data besides the search API? it appears like we're getting rate limited, but we need some way to fetch rating data for each app. – Crashalot Jun 05 '13 at 20:48
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    Sounds like you should reconsider how you are using this info. Is the problem you are trying to solve supported by only updating the top 5000 apps in the store? Are the users of your service searching for (most commonly) the most popular apps? If so, sounds like you could update daily using the iTunes RSS feeds. If users search on an app you haven't updated recently (same day) you could pull the new data from the API on the fly and cache the results on your side. – Ted Hosmann Jun 10 '13 at 05:48
  • hi ted, thanks for this. we're trying to help people discover great apps from indie devs -- not necessarily the most popular ones. we can see that you work in the itunes affiliate group and would love your input. what's the sanctioned way to get rating data? it's not in the EPF files. we're only resorting to the JSON API because it seems like this is the only way to fetch rating data. – Crashalot Jun 10 '13 at 06:08