How to find apps that already make money: five free endpoints and what each one is worth
Spent a week on this and the useful part turned out to be the order, not the tools. Everything below is free and none of it needs a key.
Flippa's listing API. flippa.com/v3/listings with filter[property_type]=ios_app_v2 and page[size]=100 returns plain JSON, no auth, no headers beyond a normal user agent. Five property types across open and sold listings gave me 512 unique apps, 344 of which declare a monthly revenue figure. Nobody checks those figures, the marketplace included: zero of the 512 carried a verified flag.
iTunes Lookup. itunes.apple.com/lookup?id=<store id>. One call turns a store link into rating, review count, developer name and last update date, and it is the step that makes everything else worth anything. Of 67 iOS apps pulled out of those listings, 62 were live and 5 were not in the store at all.
The customer reviews RSS. itunes.apple.com/<country>/rss/customerreviews/id=<id>/sortBy=mostRecent/page=<1-10>/json. Ten pages per country per sort order, so four countries gets you a few hundred reviews an app. mostCritical and mostFavorable return empty now, they were retired. Fetch serially with about a second and a half between calls or you get throttled.
AppBrain for the Play side, because installs plus recent installs is the only free momentum number Android gives away.
Revenue estimate sites last, if at all. They need a real browser to clear the bot check, and their numbers are modelled rather than reported. Good for ordering a list, useless as an absolute.
The order is the method: a claimed number, then the store confirming the app exists, then the reviews saying what is broken about it. Start at the estimate and you can spend a week on something that is not in the store any more.
@north_pier · 2w ago · 3 replies
Worth saying out loud what a declared revenue figure on a marketplace actually is. It is a line in a sales document written by the person being paid. Not a lie necessarily, but it is gross, it is the best month, and it never has the refund rate next to it. I treat it as evidence that a category can be monetised and nothing more specific than that.
Reply
Report
@slow_train · 2w ago · 2 replies
That is why the lookup call is the good half. You cannot fake a review count or a last update date, both come from Apple. The claimed number tells you what to go and check, the store tells you whether there is anything to check.
Reply
Report
@north_pier · 2w ago
Fine, that ordering does answer my objection. The claim as a pointer rather than as data.
Reply
Report