playstore-country-check

This python script/module checks all localized versions of Google's PlayStore for the availability of a specific app. Supports threading with a default of 10 simultaneous threads (rate limit of Google probably much higher!). Sample code uses the German Corona-Warn-App for COVID-19 Contact Tracing with package name de.rki.coronawarnapp.

Relies on requests and BeautifulSoup4 with lxml:

pip install requests
pip install beautifulsoup4
pip install lxml

List with country codes modified from https://github.com/danieliu/play-scraper.

Usage:

As script (with 10 parallel threads):

python playstore_country_check.py <playstore.package.name>

As module:

import playstore_country_check

# Returns list of countries where app is available, default 10 threads
playstore_country_check.availability('playstore.package.name', threads=10)

# Returns True if available, False if not available, gl = 2 letter country code)
playstore_country_check.check('playstore.package.name', 'gl')

ToDo:

• lots of error/exception handling
• make country lists configurable by cmdline switches
• make number of threads configurable when running as script
• modularize (work in progress!):
  • suppress output when running as module
  • and/or fix status messages when running as module
• classify?
• translation of country names (by scraping from PlayStore!)
• maybe modify scraping method done!

Changelog:

0.35

• adapt detection to changes from Google, fixes #2
• check for lxml module which is needed for the scraping method by BeautifulSoup4

0.3

• implemented threading for faster results (default: 10 threads)
• implemented basic modularization

0.2

• changed scraping method (only checking release date was unreliable)

0.11

• specify PlayStore package name in command line argument, default is de.rki.coronawarnapp
• added live feedback to progress indicator
• added reduced lists of countries (default: Europe only, comment/uncomment for different lists)
• added requirements.txt

0.1

• Initial release