IAB categories are an industry standard taxonomy for content categorization. With our API for Android and iOS you can find IAB categories for every mobile app. Why is that important? IAB categories are much more expressive than the categories on App Stores, respectively more than 1000 categories vs just (about) 50! Clearly not all millions and millions of apps can perfectly fit in the default App Store categories.
For example, you can get the IAB categories for Tinder on Android by its "package name" (i.e. its Android identifier) with this simple HTTP request to our IAB Categories API:
https://data.42matters.com/api/v4.0/android/apps/category.json?p=com.tinder&access_token=YOUR_TOKEN (you can get a free trial token at this link)
The JSON result will be the following:
{
"package_name": "com.tinder",
"title": "Tinder",
"market_url": "https:\/\/play.google.com\/store\/apps\/details?id=com.tinder&referrer=utm_source%3D42matters.com%26utm_medium%3Dapi",
"content_rating": "Mature 17+",
"category": "Lifestyle",
"cat_key": "LIFESTYLE",
"cat_keys": [
"LIFESTYLE",
"APPLICATION"
],
"iab_v2": [
{
"id": 239,
"parent_id": null,
"name": "Hobbies & Interests",
"type": "declared_by_dev"
},
{
"id": 188,
"parent_id": 186,
"name": "Dating",
"type": "inferred"
},
{
"id": 186,
"parent_id": null,
"name": "Family and Relationships",
"type": "inferred"
}
]
}
As you see, the developer of Tinder declared the app as "Lifestyle" which maps to "Hobbies & Interests" on the IAB taxonomy. However, with our machine learning algorithms, we can detect additional IAB categories belonging to the app, in this case "Dating" and its parent "Family and Relationships" (this hierarchy has been defined by IAB).
Of course you can also do the reverse approach: retrieve all apps in a particular IAB category. You can find how to do it in the "Examples" section of the Advanced Query API documentation.