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

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.