Can someone explain the value of such a list, am I missing something? Don't get me wrong, your project is neat and I enjoyed looking through it, but I don't understand how anyone would try to sell this or pay money for this.
Maybe these are apps with bad user interfaces or some other issue and it's a list of low hanging fruit ideas?
One app kept track of my car info (vin, insurance, mileage, fillups) and was useful. But one day it was sold - uploaded my data and put it behind a login.
P.S. Do you remember the name of that auto app? Name and shame! ;-)
Another app I had that got worse was camscanner - a scanner app that would take a picture of a document and create a .pdf out of it.
It was sold to tencent. The "privacy policy" - when you could access it (broken links) was written in broken english that basically said it did anything it wanted with your .pdf files.
The kinds of documents I would image to .pdf were extremely sensitive personal documents - think w2, documents with SSN, etc...
At least apple notes eventually added a version of camera to .pdf (though it wasn't obvious how to use it when it came out)
If anyone has good alternative suggestions I'm open, I haven't tried to look as I don't use it much anymore.
You can also do it natively now in iOS Files app and Android's Google Drive.
The real business opportunity is the sale of the list of course. It’s sort of like selling shovels to and booze to gold diggers.
So, sometimes market research is very valuable. This risk you have for "solving problems you personally have" is that you can end up trying to build infra tooling like new databases.
I agree! I didn't intent to discount market research.
>This risk you have for "solving problems you personally have" is that you can end up trying to build infra tooling like new databases.
...which is great and should be encouraged, if it's enjoyable! I was thinking more along the lines of an app store ratings scraper
You can glean information about your competitors’ usage and advertising, which can help you optimize your own app’s advertising spend.
Also, some might sell because their App resembles something popular so some users buy by mistake. Then make sure, it does not parasitise on your app!
I dont think i will put on a pay wall, i will rather try to build a community.
Q: How do you evaluate if the apps are still being paid for?
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca9/17...
There is an attached PDF with the full decision, Pages 27, 28 on reference some related cases that informed the decision.
Is Apple’s iOS App Store “public” though? Ostensibly it’s only open to Apple customers with an iOS device: accessing App Store pages in a web-browser just redirects you to the App Store.
Not if you are on an non-Apple device. Or access an iOS App Store page from a Mac. The pages show just fine.
What consequences ? Breaking ToS can get your account suspended if you even need an account for doing this, not sure what else breaking the TOS really implies.
I don't know if Google can claim ownership of this data as it's customer generated and publically available.
Not exactly - robots.txt will prevent Google from crawling the page but it might still show up in search results (without a snippet or your page title) based on how others link to it.
I guess robots.txt is all that really matters.
Here’s Play Store’s: https://play.google.com/robots.txt
There is no reason for these companies to go after some small guy scraping the app store data. But who knows - Craigslist went after one man shops. These companies might too.
So far checking only 3 marketplaces, my crawlers found so far about 100k apps, the default filters show only the more interesting once (paid and low rating)
Its free.
I will add more and more marketplaces eventually. I will also try to add some social features, like "working as a team on some idea" and posting own ideas, but will see how it goes.
Feedback welcome
EDIT: i just see it on mobile, it does not look ideal. Will need to work on that hm.
EDIT2: just added pagination :), hope it works for you.