I'm looking for the most bestest iPhone apps
October 29, 2011 12:50 AM   Subscribe

What software or web app will sort iPhone apps by the number of reviews the app has received (and show me those apps that have received the highest number of positive reviews)?

I've found websites that let you look for 5-star apps only, but you find a lot of those apps have only got a few reviews (which could be fake, or a fluke, etc.) What I'd really like is a way of generating a list of (for now, let's say*) only apps with five star (average) ratings, that is sorted by the number of ratings. This would mean that those aps that consistently and frequently got strong ratings would come up at the top.

Because I haven't found a way to do this I can't say what would be on the list, but I expect Angry Birds, for example, would be somewhere close to the top.

This could work using Apple's iTunes ratings, OR some other sites own (user-generated) ratings, but in the second case I would hope for a thriving community site with lots of reviews. Again, I'm looking to find those apps that the most people think are excellent.

*-eventually I'd probably want to look at 4-star and 4.5-star apps as well.
posted by segatakai to Computers & Internet (5 answers total) 6 users marked this as a favorite
 
Do you write scripts? Apple publishes App Store data in XML, which is retrievable via a straightforward web request. You could collect this data for yourself, applying your sorting criteria: best rated apps at the top, which are then sorted in descending order by number of ratings.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 12:57 AM on October 29, 2011


Response by poster: Sadly, I do not script. Your link looks promising but is way over my head. Thanks, though.
posted by segatakai at 5:42 AM on October 29, 2011


Response by poster: Really, huh? OK, well it's probably too late and there's likely nobody around, but... anyone have any idea why this ISN'T available? It seems to me like it should be pretty simple (for a programmer, I mean). Why wouldn't AppShopper have already incorporated this into their interface? Am I missing something?
posted by segatakai at 6:24 PM on October 29, 2011


Best answer: Maybe you could send AppShopper an email with a feature request. It might just be a UI tweak or two on their end, if they have the data in hand.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 3:22 PM on October 31, 2011


Response by poster: It turns out that secondary sorting of the results by number reviews was the (an) answer to another problem I was already in touch with Appshopper about. So, win, win!
posted by segatakai at 7:31 PM on November 10, 2011


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