About App Intel
App Intel answers one question every day: what changed on Google Play? New apps, removed apps, the fastest growers, fresh updates — with the exact install history and every store-listing change for each app.
Where the data comes from
- Public Google Play listing pages — the same app and developer pages anyone can open at play.google.com without signing in. We read the title, developer, category, ratings, install counter, version, price, screenshots and description.
- Google's published Play sitemaps — the lists of app pages Google publishes for search engines. We use them to discover new apps.
- Top charts and links between apps on public pages, to find apps sooner.
We never use private APIs, Google accounts, the Play Console or anyone's login. App Intel is not affiliated with Google; Android and Google Play are trademarks of Google LLC.
How we label numbers
Every number on the site says where it came from. We never show a guess as a fact.
- Exact
- Read directly from Google Play. Total installs come from the precise install counter included in the public listing data — not the rounded “1,000,000+” badge.
- Play range
- The public bucket Google Play shows on the listing, such as “1,000,000+”. We show it next to the exact number so you can compare.
- Derived
- Calculated by us from exact readings — for example installs per day is the change between two install counters, shown as a 7-day average. It is only as fresh as our last two checks.
- Estimate
- Anything modelled rather than measured. We do not publish install or revenue estimates today; if we add them, they will always carry this label.
Not checked yet means exactly that: we have not looked, so we show no number rather than a zero.
How often we check
- Big and fast-growing young apps: daily. Mid-sized apps: weekly. The long tail: every few months.
- Every check is compared with the previous one; title, icon, screenshots, description, version, price and availability changes go on the app's timeline.
- An app is marked removed only after its listing returns “not found” in two checks at least 6 hours apart, so a brief glitch does not trigger alerts.
- Country availability is checked storefront by storefront: live, listed but not installable, or not listed at all.
How we crawl politely
- Only pages and sitemaps that Google Play's robots.txt allows.
- One paced client: at least 0.1 s between requests plus up to 0.1 s of random delay, at most 8 at a time, and a hard daily budget of 1,500,000 requests.
- We slow down automatically on “too many requests” or server errors, and stop completely (circuit breaker) if Google shows a block page.
- No proxies, no IP rotation, no CAPTCHA solving.