iTunes search API

This iTunes search API queries Apple's catalog — apps, podcasts, music, movies, ebooks and audiobooks — and returns one typed row per result: name, artist or seller, primary genre, storefront price and currency, average rating with its count, release date, artwork URL and the store link.

The upstream is Apple's own keyless iTunes Search endpoint, the same one the stores use — but called through rotating residential exits, which is what turns a per-IP-throttled toy into something you can sweep fifty storefronts with. country selects the storefront, and the storefront decides price, currency and whether an item exists at all. For App Store work it pairs naturally with the App Store scraper API for chart and listing detail and the App Store reviews API when you need what users actually wrote.

$0.0004 per delivered result, up to 50 results per run. Nothing delivered means nothing charged.

How the iTunes search API works

Send a query, pick a media catalog (default app) and optionally a two-letter country (default us). The collector runs the search against Apple's endpoint from a clean exit in rotation and flattens each hit into a row.

Three behaviours shape real usage:

Inputs

query is the only required field. media picks the catalog — app, podcast, music, movie, ebook, audiobook or all — while country sets the storefront and max_results caps the run at up to 50 rows (default 25).

What one result looks like

Rows carry name, artist (which for apps means the seller), genre, price with currency in the storefront's own terms, rating and ratings_count, release_date, an artwork URL and the store url. The kind field disambiguates when a query spans catalogs — software, podcast, song and so on in one result set.

What the iTunes search API costs

$0.0004 per delivered result ($0.40 per 1,000). Nothing delivered means nothing charged, and the $2 monthly free credit covers roughly 5,000 results here. Volume tiers take up to 30% off.

$0.0004 per delivered result — $0.40 per 1,000. A 50-result sweep across ten storefronts is 500 rows for twenty cents; tracking a keyword's top 25 daily across five major storefronts costs about

.50 a month. The $2 monthly free allowance covers 5,000 results with no card, and only delivered rows are ever billed.

Volume tiers discount the rate as usage grows, and GET /v1/scraper/collectors reports the exact price your key pays.

iTunes search API vs Apple's own endpoint

Apple's iTunes Search API is free, keyless and public, and this collector calls it upstream — no secret sauce claimed. If you need a handful of lookups a day from one server, use Apple directly and spend nothing.

The catch at scale is the throttle: Apple's own documentation advises roughly 20 calls per minute, enforced per IP, so sustained sweeps from one address start erroring long before a pipeline finishes. The paid layer here is the infrastructure Apple does not provide — lookups spread across rotating residential exits so the per-IP ceiling stops being your ceiling, typed rows instead of Apple's fifty-field result objects, uniform behaviour across all six catalogs, and one meter alongside your other collectors. Origin data, operator-grade delivery.

Versus hitting Apple's endpoint yourself

Calling the endpoint is one line of code, so the honest comparison is about what surrounds the line:

  • The throttle finds you. Around 20 calls per minute per IP means a 100-storefront keyword sweep takes hours from one machine — or minutes through a rotation you would otherwise have to build, warm and monitor yourself.
  • The result objects are wide and inconsistent. Field names shift between catalogs — trackName versus collectionName, artistName versus sellerName — and normalising them into one comparable shape is the boring half of every project that touches this API.
  • Storefront sweeps multiply the plumbing. Iterating country codes multiplies requests, retries and error handling by the number of storefronts — precisely the dimension the per-IP throttle punishes hardest.

This endpoint sells the surroundings: rotation, normalisation and per-row billing. Prefer owning it all? The residential proxies are available raw, and the Google Play scraper API covers the other store when your comparison needs both.

What people build with it

App keyword and ASO tracking

Search your category's keywords daily per storefront and record where each app lands in the result order. rating, ratings_count and price ride along in the same rows, so position and quality trend in one table.

Podcast and media monitoring

Watch a topic across the podcast catalog — new shows surface with genre, artwork and release_date, ready for a discovery feed or a competitive digest. The same query pointed at music or movies tracks a franchise across formats.

Storefront price comparison

Run one query over a list of country codes and diff price and currency per item. Regional pricing gaps across ebooks, apps and movie rentals become a one-table analysis instead of a browser-tab marathon.

Limits, storefronts and honest caveats

A run returns up to 50 results from one storefront and one catalog — broader coverage means more runs, which parallelise up to your plan's rate limit of 60 to 1,200 requests per minute. Scope is search-shaped by design: you get catalog metadata, not user reviews, download counts or in-app purchase detail. Review text is the App Store reviews collector's territory, and download numbers are something Apple publishes nowhere at all.

The data is public catalog metadata served by Apple's own search endpoint, which keeps the collection story clean; Apple's terms still govern automated access upstream, so the usual counsel applies — for decisions with legal weight, ask a lawyer, not a docs page.

FAQ

Is the iTunes search API still available and free?

Apple's underlying endpoint is alive, keyless and free, despite years of deprecation rumours. This collector's free allowance is $2 of monthly usage — 5,000 delivered results — after which the rate is $0.0004 per result with no subscription.

Can I search the App Store in other countries?

Yes — the country parameter takes any two-letter storefront code and defaults to us. Storefront selection changes results, availability, price and currency, which is the point: regional pricing and catalog gaps only show up when you sweep storefronts side by side.

Does it return app reviews or download counts?

Neither. Rows include the average rating and the rating count, which covers most quality-signal needs; full review text is a separate collector's job, and download counts are numbers Apple has simply never published for anyone.

What media types does the iTunes API cover?

Six catalogs through one parameter: apps, podcasts, music, movies, ebooks and audiobooks, plus an all mode that searches across them with a kind field labelling each row. Same schema whichever catalog answers.

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