Programmatically check Windows Store App update

Question

I'm actually trying to find a way to check if an update is available for a Windows Store App. Is there a way to do this with an API ? thanks ! Essam

Answer 1

There is an undocumented access to the Windows Store data outlined in this post:

http://jasonthomascarter.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-friendly-developers-guide-to.html

I've pasted the text of it here, in case the site ever goes away. :)

Today I received an inquiry from a fellow developer on the support email for one of my Windows Store apps App Roulette. That was pretty refreshing, and I'm pretty open to sharing information with other developers. I get more excited to see what they will create than worried over the potential for competition. So I'm here to share with you all. Anyhow, this developer was wondering how to get this App information and I'll explain how I access that and how you can too.

First a little self promotion, in addition to App Roulette I use this information in a few other apps. Developer Dashboard a one stop shop to view the reviews from all countries for all of your apps with a simple tap to translate each review, Windows Store Developers a directory of all the developers in the Windows Store (over 10000) and their apps, Most Active Reviewers a directory of the most prolific app reviewers and their reviews, and in my own portfolio app Software Developer which lists out all the other apps I have published in the Windows Store, please give some of them a try.

Here we go! First we will start with Robots.txt file for the Windows Store website.

http://apps.microsoft.com/robots.txt

Websites use robots.txt to guide web crawlers on how to behave, what they want them to see, and what they don't want them to see.

http://www.robotstxt.org/

Web Robots (also known as Web Wanderers, Crawlers, or Spiders), are programs that traverse the Web automatically. Search engines such as Google use them to index the web content, spammers use them to scan for email addresses, and they have many other uses.

In this case the Sitemaps.xml index file is what we are interested in. http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/sitemap_index.xml

http://www.sitemaps.org/

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

The Sitemap Index file lists out each of the individual Sitemap XML files. As of this writing, the apps.microsoft.com website has 141 individual Sitemap XML files.

Inside the individual files are thousands of URL's to the web pages of Windows Store apps. Such as this URL to the PlayTo Receiver app: http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/en-us/app/playto-receiver/72a6ba17-2d4e-4a1c-bcfb-cdc5d4b32d0e

These webpages for the apps do include a good bit of information that we could scrape from the HTML but we can do better.... The key information we are getting here is the App ID's and which geographies those App ID's are published to in the store. For example: 72a6ba17-2d4e-4a1c-bcfb-cdc5d4b32d0e and en-us etc...

And now to the good stuff, there a few web services we can call using our newly found App Id's and geography information.

https://services.apps.microsoft.com/browse/6.2.9200-1/615/en-US_en-US/c/US/cp/10005001/Apps/72a6ba17-2d4e-4a1c-bcfb-cdc5d4b32d0e

There is plenty of information available through this web service but it's not clearly spelled out by the element names. Here is my interpretation of many (not all) of them to start you off.

sSubCategoryName = rawXML.getElementsByTagName('Sc')[0].getElementsByTagName('N')[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue;
sSubCategoryId = rawXML.getElementsByTagName('Sc')[0].getElementsByTagName('I')[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue;
sHasTrial = rawXML.getElementsByTagName('Try')[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue;
sDescription = rawXML.getElementsByTagName('D')[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue;
sDeveloper = rawXML.getElementsByTagName('Dev')[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue;
sWebsite = rawXML.getElementsByTagName('Ws')[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue;
sSupport = rawXML.getElementsByTagName('Sws')[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue;
sPrivacy = rawXML.getElementsByTagName('Pu')[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue;
sCategoryName = rawXML.getElementsByTagName('C')[0].getElementsByTagName('N')[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue;
sCategoryId = rawXML.getElementsByTagName('C')[0].getElementsByTagName('I')[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue;
sPrice = rawXML.getElementsByTagName('P')[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue;
sForegroundColor = rawXML.getElementsByTagName('Fg')[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue;
sBackgroundColor = rawXML.getElementsByTagName('Bg')[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue;
sAppIcon = rawXML.getElementsByTagName('Ico')[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue;
sAppName = rawXML.getElementsByTagName('T')[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue;
sPackageFamilyName = rawXML.getElementsByTagName('Pfn')[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue;
sResourceId = rawXML.getElementsByTagName('R')[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue;
sId = rawXML.getElementsByTagName('I')[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue;
sCapabilities = sCapabilities + arrCapabilities[k].childNodes[0].nodeValue+",";
sUpdate = rawXML.getElementsByTagName('Ud')[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue;
sFeatures1 = rawXML.getElementsByTagName('Dbp')[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue;
sFeatures2 = rawXML.getElementsByTagName('Dbp')[1].childNodes[0].nodeValue;
sFeatures3 = rawXML.getElementsByTagName('Dbp')[2].childNodes[0].nodeValue;
sFeatures4 = rawXML.getElementsByTagName('Dbp')[3].childNodes[0].nodeValue;
sFeatures5 = rawXML.getElementsByTagName('Dbp')[4].childNodes[0].nodeValue;
sFeatures6 = rawXML.getElementsByTagName('Dbp')[5].childNodes[0].nodeValue;
sFeatures7 = rawXML.getElementsByTagName('Dbp')[6].childNodes[0].nodeValue;
sFeatures8 = rawXML.getElementsByTagName('Dbp')[7].childNodes[0].nodeValue;
sFeatures9 = rawXML.getElementsByTagName('Dbp')[8].childNodes[0].nodeValue;
sScreenshot1 = rawXML.getElementsByTagName('Ss')[0].getElementsByTagName('U')[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue
sScreenshot2 = rawXML.getElementsByTagName('Ss')[1].getElementsByTagName('U')[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue
sScreenshot3 = rawXML.getElementsByTagName('Ss')[2].getElementsByTagName('U')[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue
sScreenshot4 = rawXML.getElementsByTagName('Ss')[3].getElementsByTagName('U')[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue
sScreenshot5 = rawXML.getElementsByTagName('Ss')[4].getElementsByTagName('U')[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue
sScreenshot6 = rawXML.getElementsByTagName('Ss')[5].getElementsByTagName('U')[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue
sScreenshot7 = rawXML.getElementsByTagName('Ss')[6].getElementsByTagName('U')[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue
sScreenshot8 = rawXML.getElementsByTagName('Ss')[7].getElementsByTagName('U')[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue
sScreenshot9 = rawXML.getElementsByTagName('Ss')[8].getElementsByTagName('U')[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue
sCaption1 = rawXML.getElementsByTagName('Ss')[0].getElementsByTagName('Cap')[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue
sCaption2 = rawXML.getElementsByTagName('Ss')[1].getElementsByTagName('Cap')[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue
sCaption3 = rawXML.getElementsByTagName('Ss')[2].getElementsByTagName('Cap')[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue
sCaption4 = rawXML.getElementsByTagName('Ss')[3].getElementsByTagName('Cap')[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue
sCaption5 = rawXML.getElementsByTagName('Ss')[4].getElementsByTagName('Cap')[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue
sCaption6 = rawXML.getElementsByTagName('Ss')[5].getElementsByTagName('Cap')[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue
sCaption7 = rawXML.getElementsByTagName('Ss')[6].getElementsByTagName('Cap')[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue
sCaption8 = rawXML.getElementsByTagName('Ss')[7].getElementsByTagName('Cap')[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue

There is more to the Windows Store than just apps, there are also reviews, and lots of them. There are currently over 210,000 reviews for apps in the Windows Store. These reviews come from all over the world, so you'll need some country codes, your handy dandy App Id's and pay attention to the pn/1 at the end, you will find that this service only returns 10 reviews per page, just increment this value to pn/2, pn/3 etc.. until you run out of reviews.

var arrCounntryCodes = ["AE", "AR", "AT", "AU", "BE", "BG", "BH", "CA", "CH", "CL", "CN", "CO", "CR", "CY", "CZ", "DE", "DK", "DZ", "EE", "EG", "ES", "FI", "FR", "GB", "GR", "HK", "HR", "HU", "ID", "IE", "IL", "IN", "IQ", "IT", "JO", "JP", "KW", "KZ", "LB", "LK", "LT", "LU", "LV", "LY", "MA", "MT", "MX", "MY", "NL", "NO", "NZ", "OM", "PE", "PH", "PK", "PL", "QA", "RO", "RS", "RU", "SA", "SE", "SG", "SI", "SK", "TH", "TN", "TR", "TT", "UA", "US", "UY", "VE", "VN"];

https://services.apps.microsoft.com/4R/6.2.9200-1/1/en-US/m/US/Apps/f514d64b-8705-43b7-a400-c4f4f3dedfc0/Reviews/all/s/date/1/pn/1

This one is much more descriptive with the element names, so I don't see any need for further explaination of this. You can see the full name, display name, the image the user has chosen to represent themselves with.

Next up we can do a little bit of seaching... https://services.apps.microsoft.com/search/6.2.9200-1/615/en-US_en-US/m/US/c/US/il/en-US/cp/10005001/query/cid/0/pf/1/pc/0/pt/x64/af/0/lf/0/s/0/2/pn/0?phrase=Software Developer

Here it gets a little cryptic again, but by now you should be used to it. You can get the App ID from the I element and take it from there back to the browse service <I>f514d64b-8705-43b7-a400-c4f4f3dedfc0</I>

So there you have it, the basics of pulling tons of information out of the Windows Store that you can then do what you please with. If you find this useful and/or make some apps utilizing the information, have some additional information to share or otherwise please let me know in the comments.

Answer 2

Windows store doesn't have any API specifically to check for an update. There is a fairly easy work around.

  var package = Windows.ApplicationModel.Package.Current;
        PackageVersion t = package.Id.Version;

This will get you the package version the user is running. You can use this to check one of your servers for the current version. You don't have to do a fancy service if you dont already have one setup for your app to use, you could use a simple text file on your web server. say "myappversion.txt". Download that through a web request.

somthing like.

        WebRequest req = WebRequest.Create(new Uri(@"http://myurl.com/MyAppversion.txt"));

        var result = await req.GetResponseAsync();

It's not ideal I know. Also consider that windows 8.1 is supposed to silently update apps so this may not even be needed though it's to be seen if that update will be before the app starts or not.

Let me know if you need more help.