DEV Community: Northgrid Data

Find which app version broke things: group App Store 1-star reviews by version in 20 lines

Northgrid Data — Sun, 01 Nov 2026 08:00:33 +0000

Disclosure: I built the Apify Actor linked at the end and charge per result. The feed below is Apple's public one and needs no key.

Apple's public reviews feed includes im:version on every review, which makes regression-spotting easy: count low-star reviews per app version.

const id = "389801252", cc = "us";
const counts = {};
for (let p = 1; p <= 10; p++) {
  const r = await fetch(`https://itunes.apple.com/${cc}/rss/customerreviews/page=${p}/id=${id}/sortby=mostrecent/json`);
  const entries = (await r.json()).feed.entry ?? [];
  if (!entries.length) break;
  for (const e of entries) {
    if (!e["im:rating"]) continue;            // skip the app's own entry
    const v = e["im:version"].label;
    counts[v] ??= { n: 0, low: 0 };
    counts[v].n++;
    if (+e["im:rating"].label <= 2) counts[v].low++;
  }
  await new Promise(r => setTimeout(r, 1000));
}
console.table(counts);

A version whose low-star share jumps versus the previous one is your suspect. Read its review texts next.

Caveats

The feed only exposes the latest ~500 reviews per app per country, so old versions have thin samples.
Run it per storefront; one country is not the whole picture.

Hosted version

Multi-country sweep, star filter, and incremental mode (only new reviews each scheduled run), pay per result: https://apify.com/northgrid-data/app-store-reviews-multi-country

Feedback welcome in the Actor's issues.

Search the App Store and look up app metadata with Apple's free iTunes API

Northgrid Data — Sun, 01 Nov 2026 02:00:43 +0000

Disclosure: I built the Apify Actor linked at the end and charge per result. The raw endpoints below are free and need no account or key.

Apple's iTunes Search API covers App Store apps, not just music.

1. Keyword search

curl -s "https://itunes.apple.com/search?term=budget+tracker&country=us&entity=software&limit=50"

Checked 2026-10-31: returns resultCount and a results array in rank order. Each item has trackName, trackId, averageUserRating, userRatingCount, price and version (the first hit was "Budget app - spending tracker", 4.7 stars, 16,274 ratings).

2. Look up an app by ID

curl -s "https://itunes.apple.com/lookup?id=389801252&country=us"

Checked 2026-10-31: returns Instagram's metadata, including userRatingCount (29,658,484 at the time). Pass several comma-separated ids to look up many apps in one call.

Gotchas

Ratings and rankings are per storefront: change country= (us, gb, de...) to compare markets.
limit maxes out at 200 for search.
Apple rate-limits this API (roughly in the tens of requests per minute per IP), so space out requests and back off on errors.
Rank = position in results; it can shift between calls, so log the timestamp if you track it over time.

Hosted version

If you'd rather not script it, I packaged search with rank, lookup and chart rows as an Apify Actor (pay per result, no subscription): https://apify.com/northgrid-data/app-store-search-charts-metadata

Feedback welcome in the Actor's issues.

Pull a Bluesky profile and recent posts with the public API (no login, no key)

Northgrid Data — Sun, 01 Nov 2026 01:30:42 +0000

Disclosure: I built the Apify Actor linked at the end and charge per result. The raw endpoints below are free and need no account.

Bluesky serves read-only data from public.api.bsky.app. No auth is needed for profiles and author feeds.

1. Profile and follower count

curl -s "https://public.api.bsky.app/xrpc/app.bsky.actor.getProfile?actor=bsky.app"

Checked 2026-10-31: the response includes did, handle, displayName, followersCount (35,471,536 at the time) and postsCount (907). actor accepts a handle or a DID.

2. Recent posts from one account

curl -s "https://public.api.bsky.app/xrpc/app.bsky.feed.getAuthorFeed?actor=bsky.app&limit=50&filter=posts_no_replies"

Checked 2026-10-31: returns a feed array; each item has post.uri, post.record.text, post.record.createdAt and like/repost counts.

Gotchas

Results are paged: pass the returned cursor back as cursor= to get the next page. limit maxes at 100.
filter can be posts_no_replies, posts_with_replies, posts_with_media or posts_and_author_threads.
Post search (app.bsky.feed.searchPosts) returned 403 from my server when I tested it, so don't assume it is open to anonymous clients.
Be polite with request rates.

Hosted version

If you'd rather not script it, I packaged profile, follower and post-feed collection as an Apify Actor (pay per result, no subscription): https://apify.com/northgrid-data/bluesky-profiles-posts-followers

Feedback welcome in the Actor's issues.

Find when a web page changed using the Wayback Machine CDX API (free, no key)

Northgrid Data — Sun, 01 Nov 2026 01:00:42 +0000

Disclosure: I built the Apify Actor linked at the end and charge per result. The raw endpoints below are free and need no key.

The Internet Archive exposes a CDX server that lists every capture it holds for a URL. Two calls cover most needs.

1. List distinct versions of a page

curl -s "https://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=example.com&output=json&collapse=digest&fl=timestamp,statuscode,digest&limit=3"

collapse=digest drops consecutive captures with identical content, so each row is a real change. Checked 2026-10-31: the first rows were timestamps 20020120142510, 20020328012821 and 20030207055228.

Open a capture at https://web.archive.org/web/<timestamp>/<url>; add id_ after the timestamp (/web/<timestamp>id_/<url>) for the raw page without the Wayback banner.

2. Find the capture closest to a date

curl -s "https://archive.org/wayback/available?url=example.com&timestamp=20200101"

Checked 2026-10-31: it returned a 200 capture from 2020-01-01 23:10:47.

Gotchas

Timestamps are YYYYMMDDhhmmss, in UTC.
Use from=/to= (years or dates) and filter=statuscode:200 to narrow results.
collapse=timestamp:6 gives roughly one capture per month.
Be gentle with request rates; the archive throttles heavy clients.

Hosted version

If you'd rather not script it, I packaged both modes as an Apify Actor (pay per result, no subscription): https://apify.com/northgrid-data/wayback-snapshots-cdx

Feedback welcome in the Actor's issues.

Search Hacker News "Who is hiring?" threads by keyword with the free Algolia API

Northgrid Data — Sun, 01 Nov 2026 00:30:51 +0000

Disclosure: I built the Apify Actor linked at the end and charge per result. The raw endpoints below are free and need no key.

Every month a "Who is hiring?" thread appears on Hacker News, with hundreds of job comments. Algolia's public HN API lets you search inside one.

1. Find the latest thread

curl -s "https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search_by_date?query=%22Ask%20HN%3A%20Who%20is%20hiring%22&tags=story,author_whoishiring&hitsPerPage=3"

Checked 2026-10-31: the newest hit was "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2026)", objectID 49922569.

2. Search its comments

curl -s "https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search?tags=comment,story_49922569&query=remote%20python&hitsPerPage=20"

Each hit has comment_text (HTML), author, created_at and objectID.

Gotchas

Replace the story id with the one from step 1 each month.
comment_text is HTML; strip tags before display.
Use &page=1, 2... to paginate.

Hosted version

If you'd rather not maintain it, I packaged this (plus story and comment search) as an Apify Actor, pay per event, no subscription: https://apify.com/northgrid-data/hacker-news-search-threads-hiring

Feedback welcome in the Actor's issues.

Pull App Store reviews for every country in one request (no login, no API key)

Northgrid Data — Sun, 01 Nov 2026 00:00:25 +0000

Disclosure: I built the Apify Actor linked below and charge per result ($0.0003/review).

Apple's public customer-reviews feed returns JSON for any app and storefront, with no authentication:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/rss/customerreviews/page=1/id=389801252/sortby=mostrecent/json

Limits worth knowing: the feed exposes only the latest ~500 reviews per app per country (10 pages of 50), has no developer replies, and one URL covers one country. To compare feedback across markets you loop over storefronts (us, gb, de, ...), paginate, deduplicate and normalise.

Minimal Node version

const r = await fetch(`https://itunes.apple.com/${cc}/rss/customerreviews/page=${p}/id=${id}/sortby=mostrecent/json`);
const entries = (await r.json()).feed.entry ?? [];
// first entry on page 1 can be the app itself; reviews have 'im:rating'

Pace requests (about 1/second), and stop when a page comes back empty.

If you don't want to maintain that

I packaged it as an Actor: multi-country sweep ("all"), star filters, since-date, keyword filter, and an incremental mode that returns only new reviews each scheduled run.

https://apify.com/northgrid-data/app-store-reviews-multi-country

Input: { "apps": ["389801252"], "countries": ["us","gb"], "maxRating": 2 }. Output fields: appId, country, rating, title, text, version, date, url.

Feedback or missing fields welcome in the Actor's issues.