Last month Apple announced their auto-ingest tool for fetching the download and update statistics for apps. The tool downloads the stats for a particular day or week as a gzipped CSV file that you can then process yourself. This is far nicer than having to try and scrape the numbers from the iTunes Connect page although the daily numbers are still restricted by a two week limit and the weekly by 13 weeks. Hopefully in the future you’ll be able to retrieve further into the past (assuming the data still exists).
I’d a bit of free time this weekend and decided to have a poke at this and see if I could grab the data and present it in a easily consumed format (i.e. JSON). Another reason for looking at this is because I have two iPhone Developer accounts and it’s be nice to see the data from both as one graph rather than having to log in and out.
To that end I wrote a couple of lumps of PHP to ingest and process the stats which is available on GitHub (https://github.com/kmonaghan/itunes-connect-auto-ingest). There’s a couple of small steps to get it all to work.
First, create a database (or just use an existing one) and create the table in schema.sql.
Next, edit boot.php. Here, you need to put in your database details and the details for each iTunes Connect account you have. To do this you need to put in an array with the following key pairs:
array('username' => 'iTunes Connect username',
'password' => 'iTunes Connect password',
'vndnumber' => 'VND number',
),
The username and password are the details you use to log into iTunes Connect. You’ll find the VND number if you log into iTunes Connect and go into ‘Sales and Trends’. It’s the number beside your name at the top left of the screen.
Update: From the comments, this is how you find the Vendor ID (VND):
Choose Sales and Reports.
Choose “Reports” from the top left menu (Where default is “Top Content”).
From the form that will be shown, choose monthly report and download.
The downloaded file will be of format S_M_(VendorID)_TIMEPERIOD.TXT
You can have as many of these accounts as you want and the ingest script will check each one.
Now all the details have been set up, you can ingest the data from Apple. This is done by simply running ingest.php. If it’s the first time the script has been run, it will look back 14 days. Otherwise, it will look in the database for the last successful day there was an import and attempt to import all days since then. After your first import, you should create a cronjob to run this script once a day to capture the latest stats. If the downloaded tar files are 0 bytes, check your login details and VND number.
Once all the data is in the db, we can view it via daily.php which outputs the results as JSON. This will by default output the total number of units downloaded for all apps in the last month. It can take four parameters:
- apple_identifier: A particular app identifier.
- product_type_identifier: This can be 1 (default) which is downloads or 7 which is updates.
- from: The date to get the stats from. Expected as dd/mm/yyyy. Defaults to 32 days ago.
- to: The date to get the stats to. Expected as dd/mm/yyyy. Defaults to yesterday.
And that’s that! There’s some Javascript in stats.html which consumes the JSON and uses the Google Chart Tools to display the results. An example of some live data using my own apps is available here.
This is very much a works-for-me lump of code, so it may not do exactly what you want but it should be easily extendable to provide exactly what you want. It will certainly not cover every error condition. I’ll probably add bits and pieces to this as I think of a stat I want to visualise or I come across a bug unexpected feature.
Something I might consider looking at in the future is writing a clone of the iTC Mobile app that utilises the saved data. It’d be a nice little project to try out Core Plot.