Getting Started with File Dumps

42matters generates file data dumps of the mobile app meta-data of apps and charts available on Google Play and iTunes and makes it available to its customers for download.

# 1) Install awscli - https://aws.amazon.com/cli/
pip install awscli --upgrade --user

# 2) Configure awscli with the credentials we've provided in your account.
aws configure --profile YOUR_COMPANY

# 3) list the contents of a folder
aws s3 ls s3://external.42matters.com/1/42apps/v0.1/production/playstore/lookup/ --profile YOUR_COMPANY

# 4) list the contents of the timestamped folder
aws s3 ls s3://external.42matters.com/1/42apps/v0.1/production/playstore/lookup/2018-08-16/ --profile YOUR_COMPANY

# 5) download the file locally
aws s3 cp s3://external.42matters.com/1/42apps/v0.1/production/playstore/lookup/2018-08-16/playstore-00.tar.gz playstore.tar.gz --profile YOUR_COMPANY

# 6) unpack the file
tar xvfz playstore.tar.gz
            

Automation with Python Boto3

In order to programmatically download the feed files use a client library for AWS S3 in the language of your choice. For Python we recommend Boto3 or S3Transfer tool for bulk downloads.

Here we show an example of how to use Boto3 to find the latest available Monthly Playstore Standard file dump and then download it. This code snippet is written in Python.

Setup boto3 with the required credentials, that you can find under Launchpad.

import boto3

s3 = boto3.resource(
    "s3",
    aws_access_key_id="xxx",
    aws_secret_access_key="xxx",
    use_ssl=True,
)

Download the file named "current", which lies in the root folder of the dump type and is always updated when there is a new dump ready. Inside it contains a link to the location on S3. Note: Daily GPlay & iTunes dumps produce two files - one for updated and one for removed apps. Accordingly there are two current files - "current-updated" and "current-removed".

current_file = s3.Object(
    "external.42matters.com",
    key="1/42apps/v0.1/production/playstore/lookup/current",
)
current_url = current_file.get()["Body"].read().decode("utf-8")

The format of the link inside is:

"https://s3.amazonaws.com/external.42matters.com/1/42apps/VERSION/production/PLATFORM/DUMP_TYPE/YYYY-MM-DD/FILE_NAME.tar.gz"

Boto3 requires to provide the bucket and key separately, so just split the url and extract the two values.

bucket, key = current_url.replace("https://s3.amazonaws.com/", "").split(
    "/", maxsplit=1
)

Download the file.

latest_dump = s3.Object(bucket, key).download_file(
    Filename="current_playstore.tar.gz"
)

Complete script example

import boto3

s3 = boto3.resource(
    "s3",
    aws_access_key_id="xxx",
    aws_secret_access_key="xxx",
    use_ssl=True,
)

current_file = s3.Object(
    "external.42matters.com",
    key="1/42apps/v0.1/production/playstore/lookup/current",
)
current_url = current_file.get()["Body"].read().decode("utf-8")

bucket, key = current_url.replace("https://s3.amazonaws.com/", "").split(
    "/", maxsplit=1
)

latest_dump = s3.Object(bucket, key).download_file(
    Filename="current_playstore.tar.gz"
)

head -n 100 playstore-00 | jq -c '.title' -r

head -n 100 itunes-00 | jq -c '.trackCensoredName' -r

Last Modified: 07 Feb 2022