TMI: Apple's AppStore Protocol Goes Live

The other day, I posted on TUAW about finding Apple's new AppStore Protocol in Apple's public storeBag.xml file. Today, I've been able to flesh out those calls and make them work--mostly through the help of iPhone hacker Pumpkin who figured out the proper protocol for accessing the AppStore servers.

At this time, Apple provides 5 AppStore calls to its new p2-panda service plus a call to legal terms and conditions. I'm swayed by Ryan Block's excellent insight that p2 probably stands for Purple 2, the iPhone's code name. These calls include:

<key>p2-top-ten</key>
<string>http://ax.phobos.apple.com.edgesuite.net/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewTopTensList</string>
<key>p2-service-terms-url</key>
<string>http://www.apple.com/legal/itunes/ww/</string>
<key>p2-panda-storefront</key>
<string>http://ax.phobos.apple.com.edgesuite.net/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/pandaStoreFront</string>
<key>p2-panda-genres</key>
<string>http://ax.phobos.apple.com.edgesuite.net/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewFeaturedGenres</string>
<key>p2-panda-top-fifty</key>
<string>http://ax.phobos.apple.com.edgesuite.net/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewTopFifty</string>
<key>p2-panda-updates</key>
<string>http://ax.phobos.apple.com.edgesuite.net/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPandaUpdates</string>

The calls query iTunes just like you would with non-AppStore content. You may request the storefront, genre information and so forth. Unlike normal iTunes content you must be an iPhone for the store to respond without an error. To spoof this, use a user agent of iTunes-iPhone/1.2.0 and make sure you specify the proper storefront, X-Apple-Store-Front: 143441-1,2. The content arrives, as with iTunes content, gzipped.

What's there

The AppStore storefront seems MIA. Every time I connect, I get an error of "The iTunes Store is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later". The top tens don't seem to work either. The other items (updates, featured genres, top 50) are clearly placeholders as they develop the store. For example, the so-called JouleData Solutions application has a bundle id of "com.apple.calculator.installed", links to "http://www.example.com", and offers buy parameters of "foo=bar".

New Apple server sites include skelly.apple.com and gharsa.apple.com (the latter was actually mentioned in a 2004 Perl post on derkeiler.com but no sign of it since.) I wonder if skelly and gharsa are the names of a couple of engineers working on the AppStore project.

If you're curious about the XML, here is the top 50 listing, updates, and genres.

I hacked together a little utility that you can compile up yourself and test.