August 9, 2022

15:24

Hm, there’s a sub over at Reddit where users can post Google Play deals (apps that are currently available at a discount or even temporarily free). Would be nice to import that into Raccoon. The raw data can be accessed via:

curl "https://www.reddit.com/r/googleplaydeals/top.json?limit=50&t=year" -o /tmp/deals.json

There’s an annoying rate limit on that REST endpoint, requiring local caching. The path to the relevant Google Play link is 🗋 data/children/data/url . Unfortunately, this only works if the redditor links directly to the Playstore instead of making a text post (the later is common).

Problems:

  • Yield is very low (due to links being hidden away in text posts).
  • Would need to filter locally, if a deal is still valid (doable).
  • Very random collection of apps (usually icon packs or games).
  • Lots of junk apps, one wouldn’t even want for free (IAP, ads, tracking, …)
  • Paid apps will almost always perform an online license check. So they are unlikely to run on a de-Googled device (paying anonymously for an app is possible, using gift cards. Temporarily free apps do not require one at all).

All in all: not sure how useful this would be. If privacy is a concern, then probably only the icon packs are of any use (and would still need rebundling of the assets, as the APK is typically infested with trackers, ads or other nonsense).

I’ll stick it in the non-fleshed out feature requests folder for now.