# App store API: search the Apple App Store and Google Play by keyword, per call

Give your agent a keyword and get the store listing rows back: app name, developer, rating, review count, price and the store link, from the Apple App Store and from Google Play, both through one treg.to key from $0.015 a search at the provider's own rate with $0.000 added. No Apple developer account, no Play console, no proxy pool and no scraper of your own to keep alive when a store changes its markup. The two stores are separate shelves here, not two views of one dataset, so ask for both when you want both.

## What's the best way to ask ChatGPT?

Setup line (paste into any agent): `set up treg — https://treg.to/llms.txt`

Then ask: "Using treg, search the Apple App Store and Google Play for apps matching a habit tracker, show me the price per search first, then put the results from each store in one table with developer, rating, review count and price, and mark the apps that appear in both."

- **Name both stores** Apple and Google Play are separate calls with separate app ids and separate rankings. One store is one search; both is two.
- **Say which country** Store results are per storefront. The US list and the UK list are different lists, and the agent will pick for you if you do not.
- **Ask for the columns** The rows carry the developer, the rating, the review count, the price and the link. Name the ones you want or the whole listing comes back.
- **Ask for the price first** treg.to prints the rate before the call, so a hundred keywords across two stores has a number on it before anything runs.

## Why go through treg.to

- **One key, not 9 accounts** treg.to holds the provider keys. Neither you nor the agent sees them.
- **Price before the call** The provider's own rate, $0.000 markup, from a prepaid balance.
- **No subscription, no seats** Charged per call. $1.00 free per new team, no card to start.
- **Your own keys are free** Already pay Hunter? Register it and those calls are never metered.
- **Switch by changing a word** Another provider is a different word in the prompt, not a new integration.
- **Nothing to integrate** No SDK, no OAuth dance per vendor, no seats.

## Behind the scenes: what ChatGPT sees before it calls

treg.to does not choose for you. It hands ChatGPT this comparison and it picks, or you tell it how.

### What does an app store search cost?

- Cheapest per found: SerpApi at $0.015 (`serpapi.app-store.search.apps`)

### Which store search is the most reliable?

- SerpApi: 100% over 30 calls, 1.3s median
- SerpApi: 100% over 47 calls, 1.6s median

Measured on treg.to traffic; not a controlled benchmark.

### How do the two stores compare?

#### Apple App Store

| Provider | Price | Accepts | Verified |
|---|---|---|---|
| SerpApi | $0.015 per found | engine, term, country, lang, num, page | 2026-07-28 |

#### Google Play

| Provider | Price | Accepts | Verified |
|---|---|---|---|
| SerpApi | $0.015 per found | engine, q, gl, hl, apps_category, age | 2026-07-28 |

Endpoints:

- `serpapi.app-store.search.apps`: treg call serpapi.app-store.search.apps --query engine=apple_app_store --query term=coffee
- `serpapi.google-play.search.apps`: treg call serpapi.google-play.search.apps --query engine=google_play --query q=coffee

## What people actually struggle with

App store threads are unusually seeded: of the ~140 Reddit and X posts read in August 2026, more than half were builders announcing their own scrapers, one ran the same review-scraper copy through seven subreddits, and one post seeded zero-width spaces at every paragraph break. These five are developers hitting the wall in public.

**Deep store ranks are interpolated, not measured**

> "The paid SERP APIs go deeper, but tools that don't pay for them and still show you 'rank #63' are interpolating, not measuring." (r/androiddev, 11 points: https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/1va99d9/psa_google_play_only_exposes_30_search_results/)

What this page can do about it: That is the honest ceiling and this page will not pretend past it. The rows return the store's own results in the store's own order, as deep as the store exposes them, and treg.to publishes no rank number of its own.

**Apple's free endpoint stops answering without notice**

> "As of this morning (April 16), all my requests to the /search endpoint are returning HTTP 404 Not Found." (r/iOSProgramming, 11 points: https://www.reddit.com/r/iOSProgramming/comments/1sn3k1m/itunes_search_api_returning_404_for_search/)

What this page can do about it: That is Apple's public iTunes Search endpoint, which is free, undocumented in practice, and not in this catalog. The rows here are a paid provider's store engines, billed only on a successful search, with what the live traffic shows rather than an uptime promise.

**Everything is API first except the store itself**

> "To have to scrape them from the app store pages when everything else is so API first seems like a miss." (X, 19 likes: https://x.com/i/status/2092565867145879853)

What this page can do about it: Agreed, and that is the whole reason this row exists. The agent sends a keyword and a country and gets rows; the scraping, the proxies and the markup changes are the provider's problem, at a price printed before the call.

**The free endpoint carries none of the numbers you want**

> "the itunes search api does not give downloads, subscriptions, or any financial metrics, and it does not provide subscription pricing either." (X, 69 likes: https://x.com/i/status/1994112990866518506)

What this page can do about it: True, and neither do these rows. Listing price, rating and review count come back; installs and revenue do not exist in any public store response, and no provider on this page can conjure them.

**The whole store is bigger than the context window**

> "welp, even using a 1M token context limit, the data is too large." (r/shopifyDev, 77 points: https://www.reddit.com/r/shopifyDev/comments/1o4ugbp/an_analysis_of_15003_apps_in_the_shopify_app_store/)

What this page can do about it: Which is the argument for asking for columns rather than everything. Say which fields a row needs in the prompt, cap the result count, and the agent reads a table instead of drowning in a store dump.


## What actually differs

- One provider serves both stores at one rate. SerpApi runs the Apple App Store engine and the Google Play engine at the same flat price per successful search, metered from your team's prepaid balance at SerpApi's own rate with $0.000 added, and its rate card says a failed or cached search is not billed. Both rows were verified against the live API on 2026-07-28. A new team's free dollar is a few dozen searches across both stores.
- The two engines take different parameters, and the Play row does two jobs. Apple's engine wants a search term; Google Play's wants a query, and the same row answers the store charts as well as a keyword search depending on what you send. Read the docs linked on each row before an agent loops, because treg.to relays the store's own response verbatim and models neither store's API.
- What is not here is the part most people are really after. This is search, not rank tracking: nothing stores yesterday's position, and there is no keyword popularity index, no download or revenue estimate and no review feed on these two rows. Google Play also stops exposing results publicly at shallow depth, which android developers have measured for themselves, so a position deeper than the first page or two is not a number any public search can honestly return. An agent can rebuild position over time by running the same search on a schedule you give it and keeping the results.

## What is an app store API?

An app store API returns what a store's search results page holds, as data: the apps matching a keyword, in the store's own order, with the developer, the rating, the review count, the price and the listing link. It is not App Store Connect and it is not the Google Play Developer API. Those are the accounts you own, and they only cover your own apps. It is also not Apple's public iTunes Search endpoint, which is free, answers a different query shape, and is not in this catalog. The two rows here read the two public stores and relay what the store returned.

## Questions

**Do I need an Apple or Google developer account?** No. Both rows run on treg.to's own key and bill per successful search from your team's balance at SerpApi's rate with no markup. A developer account is for publishing apps and reading your own; this reads the public store.

**Is this App Store Connect or the Play Developer API?** No. Those two are your own account's APIs and they only see apps you publish: your installs, your ratings, your revenue. This page is the public store search, so it sees any app but none of the private numbers behind it.

**Can I track where my app ranks for a keyword over time?** Your agent can, by running the search on a schedule you set and keeping the results. treg.to has no scheduler, no history and no ASO rank tracker. The honest limit is depth: the stores expose only so many results, and a rank below that is a guess wherever you read it.

**Can I get reviews, downloads or keyword volume?** Not from these two rows. They return the search listing and nothing more. The catalog carries app review and app data endpoints from other providers on their own shelves, and Apple's keyword popularity is a relative index behind an Apple Search Ads account, not a search volume figure anyone can resell.

HTML version: https://treg.to/use-cases/app-store-search