We benchmarked 6 web scraping providers against 1,000 Apple App Store pages, for a total of 6,000 requests, and measured success rate, completion time, and the number of metadata fields each provider returned.

Apple App Store scraping benchmark

Since all providers achieved 100% success rates, we focused our comparison on the number of metadata fields returned and end-to-end response times. You can read benchmark methodology section for details on the benchmarking process.

Data fields you can scrape from App Store

Only Bright Data and SerpApi returned structured data; the responses from Oxylabs, Nimble, Zyte, and Decodo were parsed via CSS selectors (extracting title, rating, and developer). The table below lists fields available in one structured provider but not the other.

Both providers also returned the same core fields, including title, developer, rating, price, age_rating, in_app_purchases, screenshots, reviews, rating count, privacy info, and version info.

Apple App Store providers & benchmark results

Bright Data offers two scraper APIs for the Apple App Store:

• Apple App Store, Collect by URL (apps.apple.com): scrapes app product pages and returns detailed metadata such as title, rating, price, screenshots, monetization features, and version history.
• Apple App Store Reviews, Collect by URL (apps.apple.com, 608 fields): collects user reviews from a given app URL.

Bright Data also provides two ready-to-use datasets in their Dataset Marketplace:

• Apple App Store dataset: pre-collected metadata on app popularity, user feedback, and monetization features. Useful for market trend analysis and app performance evaluation.
• Apple App Store Reviews dataset: pre-collected user reviews. Useful for sentiment analysis, competitor benchmarking, and user engagement insights.

In Apple App Store benchmark, Bright Data returned the highest number of structured JSON metadata fields among all tested providers, with a 100% success rate.

Oxylabs does not offer a dedicated Apple App Store scraper API, so the App Store can be accessed through Web Scraper API.

Web Scraper API (Universal source): a generic endpoint that handles any URL, including Apple App Store pages. Returns rendered HTML, which then needs to be parsed with custom logic.

Since the response is HTML, metadata fields were extracted with CSS selectors for title, rating, and developer. End-to-end latency was in the mid-tier range compared to the other providers tested.

Decodo has an Apple App Store Scraper API listed as coming soon in their catalog, planned to extract app rankings, reviews, ratings, pricing, and other metadata for app performance tracking and market analysis. Until it launches, Apple App Store URLs are scraped through their Web Scraper API.

Web Scraper API v2: a general-purpose scraping endpoint where you submit any URL and Decodo runs it through a headless browser. The response comes back as fully rendered HTML, leaving field extraction (such as title, rating, or developer) to the client side.

Decodo’s end-to-end response time landed in a similar mid-tier range as Oxylabs.

SerpApi provides three dedicated APIs for the Apple App Store:

• Apple App Store Product Page API (engine=apple_product): scrapes app product pages by product_id and returns detailed metadata including title, developer, rating, rating count, price, screenshots, version history, in-app purchases, privacy info, and similar apps.
• Apple App Store Reviews API (engine=apple_reviews): collects user reviews for a given app, with support for sorting, pagination, and filtering by country.
• Apple App Store Search API (engine=apple_app_store): runs keyword searches against the App Store and returns app listings, useful for discovery, ranking research, and category browsing.

SerpApi does not provide pre-built Apple App Store datasets; all data is fetched on demand through these live endpoints.

For SerpApi, we used the Apple App Store Product Page API. The response is fully structured JSON with no parsing required on the client side, returning 27 metadata fields per app. End-to-end latency was the lowest among all tested providers, often under one second per request.

Nimble doesn’t have an Apple App Store specific product, but the App Store can be scraped using:

Extract API: send any URL with render: true and a browser driver (we used vx10). The response contains the post-render HTML of the page, and field extraction is left to the client.

We scraped Apple App Store pages with Nimble using the Extract API with stealth rendering.

Zyte offers two different approaches for scraping the Apple App Store, both through their unified Zyte API:

• Zyte API with browserHtml: a single endpoint where you submit any URL and Zyte runs it through a real headless browser, executes JavaScript, and returns the fully rendered HTML.
• Zyte API with httpResponseBody: the same endpoint without browser rendering, returning the raw HTTP body.

Apple App Store scraping benchmark methodology

We ran 1,000 Apple App Store product page URLs against 6 web scraping providers, generating 6,000 total requests. Providers included in the test all had a minimum company size of 100 employees. The same URL set was sent to every provider, and three dimensions were measured: success rate, end-to-end completion time, and the number of metadata fields each provider could deliver.

Response types

Two of the six providers (Bright Data and SerpApi) returned fully structured JSON. The remaining four returned the page as rendered HTML, which we then parsed with CSS selectors targeting three core fields: title, rating, and developer.

Validation

Each request had to clear three checkpoints to count as successful:

• Submission: HTTP status had to land in the 200–399 range, or be a clean 404.
• Execution: For providers running asynchronous jobs, the snapshot had to complete without errors or timeouts.
• Data check: The response had to actually carry app data. On the JSON side, at least one of title, rating, developer, or number_of_reviews needed to be populated. On the HTML side, at least one of the CSS selectors had to match content on the page.

Completion time

Time was measured wall-clock, from sending the request to receiving the final response. For asynchronous providers, this naturally includes any queueing and polling overhead.

URL selection

The 1,000 URLs were sourced from across the Apple App Store, spanning categories such as games, social, productivity, finance, fitness, and photo & video, with apps covering a broad range of popularity. URLs were collected via keyword searches.

Test conditions

To keep the comparison fair, every provider ran under the same constraints:

• Sequential execution, one request at a time, no parallelism
• 2-second pause between consecutive requests
• HTTP 429 backed off for 30 seconds, with up to 3 retries
• 300-second timeout on submission
• 600-second timeout on execution
• One run per URL per provider

FAQs

Nazlı Şipi

AI Researcher

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Nazlı is a data analyst at AIMultiple. She has prior experience in data analysis across various industries, where she worked on transforming complex datasets into actionable insights.

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