AppGoblinThanks for checking out this project
Marketing Community & Feedback
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Background
Originally this came out of a curiosity I had about the IAB app-ads.txt standard in 2022. In order to scrape app-ads.txt files I had to first get 4,000,000+ iOS and Android apps + their respective publisher URLs. While that project, like app-ads.txt itself, went unused, I remained interested in letting the database of apps keep growing. Then in the fall of 2023 while on haitus from real work, I started working on an API and UI.
Now, App Goblin is the combination of several open source projects I built. Yes, there are a large number of similar companies like data.ai and sensortower.com which have many more features. But it was a great project for me to learn more frontend and javascript as well as give me something to do with the scraper which I had built previously (whats the point of a database if you cant use it somehow). For now App Goblin is simply here as a resource free of charge as it's running costs only $20 a month or so in hosting.
If you have questions or suggestions please feel free to reach out.
jamesoclaire.com
Open Source Tech Stack
First is the underlying data which is collected and maintained from github.com/ddxv/adscrawler The adscrawler uses Python & PostgreSQL to crawl app stores to collect apps and their basic information like names and rating counts. This data is then stored to the PostgreSQL database.
The website itself is also open source and can be found at github.com/ddxv/app-store-dash The website is built from a Python backend API based on LiteStar which manages queries to the PostgreSQL database. The API is used by a JavaScript Svelte frontend with Tailwind and Skeleton for CSS. All projects are glued together with systemd and websockets where needed. Everything is hosted on AWS in the small EC2 instances.
You can also reach me personally:
https://jamesoclaire.com