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Download App Store Top Charts Data
42matters is a service that monitors app rankings for various stores and categories. If you’re in the mobile app business, this data can be very valuable for you! We can legally scrape this data from 42matters using a little-known technique involving HAR files without violating their Terms of Service.
This is because we will be scraping a recording of your web traffic, which was obtained while you used 42matters in full accordance with the Terms of Service as you’ll see below, and are simply extracting data out of a recording instead of scraping the actual 42matters website.
1. Apply Top Chart Filters
Head to the 42matters Top Charts Explorer (or any similar webpage with interactive data) and then right click inside your browser to open up developer tools. This will begin recording your web traffic so we can capture the raw data 42matters sends to our browser.
Then select an option in the filters on the page to match the data you want to scrape. E.g. change the platform to iOS to force the website to reload its data now that you’re recording. You can keep browsing and paginating through the data to fetch more and more results (e.g. keep selecting different dates to load historical data).
2. Export a HAR File
Once you’ve browsed through the data you want to capture, open the “Network” tab in developer tools and click on the down arrow labeled “Export HAR…” to download a HAR file with a copy of the app store data sent to your browser.
Then upload that file to the HAR File Web Scraper and we’ll securely parse out the data from your web recording into downlodable collections.
3. Download App Store Data
Look for the collection with the app rankings in them and hit the download button to save a CSV file with this data to your computer.