API call for user count in Chrome Web Store? [clos

Question

I have an extension in the Chrome Web Store and I like knowing roughly how many people are using it via the "N users" and ratings on its page.

However, I don't really like loading the whole "product" page just to see a couple of numbers and thought I'd try to make a little widget that would display it instead. However, I can't find any API documentation for the Chrome Web Store.

I would a call like /webstore/api/v1/appid.json to exist, but the closest things I've found in searching only concern the Licensing API.

Is there an official Chrome Web Store API for user metrics?

Answer 1

Actually there IS some Chrome webstore API. https://developer.chrome.com/webstore/using_webstore_api

Answer 2

This is no such API.

You can use Google Analytics inside an extension to track users manually.

If you don't need anything fancy, just a number of installs and users, there is My Extensions extension, it will track those numbers for you.

Answer 3

You can also do this client-side only (at least on your end) by using a cross-domain tool. This snippet will grab the number of users displayed on the Chrome webstore page for an extension (up-to-date as of April 28, 2018):

var chromeExtensionWebstoreURL = 'https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/background-image-for-goog/ehohalpjnnlcmckljdflafjjahdgjpmh';

$.getJSON('http://www.whateverorigin.org/get?url=' + encodeURIComponent(chromeExtensionWebstoreURL) + '&callback=?', function(response){
    var numUsers = ((""+response.contents.match(/<span class="e-f-ih" title="([\d]*?) users">([\d]*?) users<\/span>/)).split(",")[2]);
    console.log(numUsers);
});

In the future, Google may change the class name of the user count span, in which case you just need to update the regex appropriately.

Answer 4

Copy and paste the snippet below wherever you want in the body of a html document saved with a ".php" extension.

<?php

//URL of your extension
$url = "https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ddldimidiliclngjipajmjjiakhbcohn";

//Get the nb of users
$file_string = file_get_contents($url);
preg_match('#>([0-9,]*) users</#i', $file_string, $users);
$nbusers = str_replace(",", "",$users[1]);

echo $nbusers; //Display the number of users

?>