With every new week, there is a new opportunity to be added to the App Store’s Featured lists. I don’t know about you, but I definitely want to know if my apps have been picked! We have previously discussed AppStoreRank, a Perl script which simply goes out, and gets the app store rank for your application for each country, based on a simple to set up hash at the top of the script.
Here’s a sample of two apps, Hurricane and Weather HD:
my @appName = (
{ appName =>"Hurricane",
appID => 291430598,
popId => ['Paid App','Gross App'],
genreId => 36,
featuredCategories => ["New and Noteworthy","Whats Hot","Staff Favorites"],
categoryName => ["Weather","Top Overall"] },
{ appName =>"Weather HD",
appID => 364193735,
popId => ['Paid iPad App','Gross iPad App'],
genreId => 36,
featuredCategories => ["Staff Favorites"],
categoryName => ["Weather","Top Overall"] },
);
As you can see above, we now have a featuredCategories hash key which is a plain english way of getting the single “Staff Favorites” from Weather HD, or multiple featuredCategories as you can see in Hurricane.
This simple syntax allows you to set which featuredCategories you would like to use. featuredCategories is not required, so if you would not like to see the results of searching the featured categories, you can remove the whole line.
The available options can be found at the bottom of the script, where we have taken them out of the way of the actual running of the code. This makes it a lot easier to debug on my part, and well, where they are placed really does not matter. You will most likely set this up once, and forget about it.
By default, this script will only get featured categories on Tuesdays, since this is the day that Apple changes the featured list around the world. You will want to make sure that you run the script in the morning of your time zone, so if there is a delay based on time zone, you can catch all countries you are featured in. In addition, a simple change in the code:
if($wday ==2) {
will enable you to change from Tuesday to Wednesday, or allow for multiple days. Removing the check all together will allow this part of the script to be run daily.
If you want to see this type of information in a graph on your Mac, I highly suggest you take a look at AppViz. This is an app that I use daily in addition to my script to ensure that I have the most up to date information about all of my apps!
Once again, my script is a modification of the original by Erica Sandun which was published back in 2008. Unlike some of the other modifications of her script, this one doesn’t require extra packages, and it just works. I keep this script up to date since I have it set on a cron to check the statistics during the middle of the night and email the report back to me… I like waking up to the fresh smell of statistics in the morning, don’t you?
Happy tracking!
Download: AppStoreRank.zip
