Some content-based websites are switching entirely from having a website to merely having a native mobile application that displays the same material as their website. Other applications deliver content in the same manner as websites. The shift in preference from webpages to applications can be attributed to the rise in mobile phone usage—more individuals than ever before utilise mobile phones, sometimes known as smartphones. Nowadays, more cell phones than five years ago are using the internet. The number of smartphone mobile network subscriptions is expected to exceed 7.7 billion by 2028. This forecast shows the growing appreciation of smartphones and their capabilities.

The information mentioned above indicates that more mobile solutions will be developed and that some content-sharing websites will include native apps as one of their primary platforms. At the same time, this may imply various things to different individuals, at Crawlbase, our main interest is how to crawl and scrape the web successfully. We provide you with the most recent online information and demonstrate how web crawling and scraping operate.

This blog post will explore the steps in scraping mobile apps for data or content. You will learn the different scenarios to determine your business’s next move.

Mobile App vs Website

The functioning of mobile applications differs significantly from that of web pages. In essence, a functioning website may be accessed with any web browser on any internet-capable device, demonstrating the platform independence of websites. This simplifies things greatly because you may choose any smartphone, tablet, portable gaming system, etc., that satisfies the previously mentioned requirements (web browser and internet connectivity). Simply enter the website address, and presto! Everything is visible to you on your screen. A bot can mimic a browser and the actions a human may do on a website because of how straightforward things are in this situation. It will, therefore, be perceived as a human visiting the website. After that, the bot can store and extract data from the site.

The operation of a mobile app differs. Because these applications aren’t platform-independent like web pages, they can only be accessible on the smartphone platform for which they were designed. Due to the two factors mentioned above and the fact that smartphones are not ideal devices for web scraping, crawling and scraping mobile apps is nearly tricky.

Scrape Mobile Apps for Data

How to Scrape Mobile Apps for Data?

However, it is still possible to scrape mobile applications.

  • Step 1: Let’s begin by downloading and installing the programme on your PC using ARC Welder on Google Chrome or an emulator. These two settings work for Android apps as well as Windows computers.
  • Drawback: Data extraction and scraping are not guaranteed to be successful after the programme is installed. This is just hypothetical.
  • Step 2: After installing Fidler or WireShark on Chrome (the best choice) using ARC Welder, you may use them to monitor your PC’s HTTP/HTTPS traffic. These two programs monitor your computer’s online activity.
  • Drawback #1: The first drawback is that these programmes track every data that enters and leaves your computer. As a result, the output will contain impure data.
  • Drawback #2: An additional issue is that many applications these days encrypt the data that enters and leaves the app; as a result, you won’t be able to view the data through the apps, as the decryption key is unique to the app.

You can see that scraping mobile applications is nearly hard based on the uncertainties mentioned above. It’s advisable to state that the hassle and all the connected costs are not worth it.

Switching to these programmes’ online versions is your best option. Since their inception, most mobile applications, including Quora, Reddit, LinkedIn, and Amazon, have had online counterparts. This is excellent news as a reliable web scraper, such as Crawlbase, is required to scrape these websites. Web versions of applications are now available even for mobile devices. Take Instagram as an example. More and more will launch websites to appeal to those like me who prefer to work on desktops over little cellphones. Everything looks fantastic on my larger-screen PC.

Can Smart Phones Do Everything?

These days, cell phones play an increasingly complex role in our daily lives. When we suggest that some individuals view mobile phones as fundamental necessities, you can understand. This is the outcome of the different functionalities that modern smartphones may provide.

In recent times, smartphones have become part of the business landscape. As more professionals rely on their mobile to get things done. The increase in remote work has increase the virtual office settings. Now, you can make and edit pitch decks, and even carry out graphic design through different available applications.

Despite its evolving nature, phones cannot be used for multi-complex tasks like scraping. Smartphone OEMs’ “tiny computers” capabilities have been exaggerated to promote their unique technological products. You’ve been led to think that, following microprocessors, the newest and most advanced flagship models from your preferred smartphone manufacturer represent the pinnacle of computer innovation.

Thanks to their strong CPUs, these smartphones are unquestionably compelling and capable of doing many things their predecessors could not achieve. However, all of these capabilities are limited by the small screen that comes with the device. Anything above that won’t cause scratches on your smartphone. For instance, your smartphone might stall while engaging in CPU/GPU-intensive activities like Bitcoin mining or web scraping.

Why Smartphones Can’t Be Used to Scrape Websites

Mobile phones cannot handle the rigorous process of reading and learning web pages simultaneouly to pull data. While some phones have show capacity to carry out major tasks, it is not advisable to use your phones for any crawling activity. Depending on the volume of data you are scraping, and the source, your online scraping tool may be able to send billions of queries per hour, which your phone is incapable of. It’s possible that you were informed that your phone has a quad-core (or more) processor running at 2.7 GHz, 4GB to 6GB of RAM, etc.

These can only affect mobile gaming, audio and video streaming through services like Netflix, Spotify, or others, as they are the leading causes of smartphone processor issues. You may easily perform basic word processing on your phone using any mobile office app. Computer are primarily designed to handle larger tasks with better processing power.

Modern computers (either laptop or desktop) are developed with more processing power and archectiture to do multi-complex tasks like web scraping.

Why Scrape Mobile Apps?

Most smartphones are loaded with mobile apps for them to function maximally. In this current age, one of the best ways to extract data from third-party apps is through scraping. Here are some of the reasons why you should scrape data from apps:

  • Competitor analysis: Since most companies have or interact with mobile apps for boosted productivity. It is in their best interest to pull data from mobile apps to be updated on industry activities. For instance, eCommerce brands might crawl competitors’ apps to learn more about their prices and interface. This could help increase their market share and revenue.
  • Transportation and Navigation: Scraping data from mobile apps from transportation and navigation apps gives out real-time tracking of routes, traffic conditions, public transit schedules, or ride-sharing services. Collect valuable data for developing navigation tools, optimizing commutes, or building transportation-related services.
  • Digital analysis: Most companies now have digital footprints either through emails, websites or social media. To stay abreast of what your counterparts in the industry are doing, you need to create an overall analysis of their digital footprints. You can use Crawlbase API to learn their social media activites to know how you can do better.
  • Price analysis: Pricing is one of the major levers of generating revenue for companies and for them to beat competition. Scraping mobile apps may show you how the average prices for a particular product in your industry which would help you set your pricing.
  • Financial services and technology: Mobile app scraping can help you learn and make good financial decisions. You can scrape real-time investment news to help boost your chances of making a good investing decision. Also, organizations can crawling financial news sites to get noteworthy information about their competitors.
  • Health: Some health apps personalize your fitness plan through consented tracking. Scraping data for health purposes is important for organizations to gather insights to help their users and customers.
  • Real estate: You can scrape real estate sites to get data for property rates, and other housing details easily. These could save you the stress of opening multiples pages on the internet during your house hunting.

Programming Languages For Scraping Mobile Apps

Crawlbase API is compatible with most popular programming languages. To scrape mobile apps, you can languages based on your need and preferences. Here are some of the common ones:

  • Python: This programming language can be used to scrape mobile apps effortlessly. You can rely on its different packages like Selenium, Scrapy, BeautifulSoup and Requests to pull and process data from mobile apps.
  • Postman: This tool is used for API development and testing. It can used to processs API queries and extract data from mobile apps.Ruby: This programme is also well-known for development projects and can be used to scrape data from mobile apps. RestClient and HTTParty are common libraries to execute these tasks.
  • PHP: Scraping data with this languages can be done through Guzzle, cURL and Requests. Web developers are more conversant with this language.
  • Java: Another popular language that can be used to extract data from mobile apps with frameworks like Apache and OkHttp.
  • JavaScript: This language is a popular language among developers and can be used to scrape mobile applications. You can use libraries like Fetch, Superagent and Axios to extract data from apps.
  • Node.js: This server-side language uses libraries like Axios, Request and node-fetch to pull data from mobile apps.
  • cURL: This command-line utility works with most operating systems to pull data from multiple sources, including mobile apps.

What are Challenges of Scraping Data from Mobile Apps?

Just like many online tasks, scraping data on mobile apps comes with it’s own challenges. There are guidelines that should be followed to ensure smooth crawling process. Here are some of them:

  • Terms and conditions: Most applications have terms of service that should be followed by its users. While most people overlook these terms. It is important for you to review these guidelines before crawling applications to avoid legal issues.
  • Intellectual Property Rights: It is very important to respect intellectual rights when scraping mobile apps. Using another person data culled from scraping is an offence that can be used against an organization.
  • Privacy issues: Data privacy and protection is one of the most-talked about topics in the modern landscape and crawlers also have to deal with this issue. Before crawling an application, you need to abide by the various data privacy laws. Also, when a data is crawled, you need to adhere to data usage policies of each jurisdiction.
  • Anti-scraping guidelines: These measures are put in place by companies to avoid competitors from viewing data through their digital footprints. There is a need to be careful when scraping mobile apps to avoid violation of such measures.
  • Copyright: Most brands have proprietary authorizations of their items. When pulling data, you need to careful not to use copyrighted materials. To avoid getting caught in a web of legal battle, it is better to use data responsibly.
  • Industry regulations: Industries like betting and financial services frown at scraping data from their apps due to the level of sensitive data they operate with. You can learn about various industry restrictions to avoid legal compliance issues.

Best Practices for Ethical and Efficient Mobile App Scraping

Although there are a lot of insights to be gained from mobile app scraping, it is essential to handle it wisely and appropriately. By adhering to these recommended practices, you may collect valuable data while honouring moral limits and technological constraints:

  • Prioritize APIs Whenever Possible: The most efficient and moral method of accessing data is using an application that offers a public API (Application Programming Interface). Most APIs are already data and legal compliant, enabling you to stay out of trouble.
  • Choose the Right tools: Pick a crawling provider or service that caters to your specific needs. Also, it is important to know what the crawler’s capacity to avoid getting blocked by mobile apps.
  • Load material dynamically: You need to use headless browsers or JavaScript rendering to load content dynamically. This would enable to get a robust information from scraping.
  • Error handling: Errors should be handled in a strategic way to avoid having an inacurate report. You can leverage the log to know this error and back up regularly to avoid data loss or disruptions.
  • Adapt your machine: A good crawling provider or service should be flexible enough to adapt to different development environments. This would help you get the best out of web scraping. Whether you’re working with a large-scale system or a mobile app development company, it is also important to monitor your scraper’s performance and updates.

Crawl Data from Mobile Apps Seamlessly

Crawlbase has helped several organizations like yours stay ahead of the competition through our innovative tools and products. We understand the current need for web scraping for business growth and have learned how to serve many industries with respect to data privacy and protection.

Our easy-to-use setup enables both technical and non-technical users to crawl and scrape data on websites seamlessly. Sign up now to learn more about our products.