googleplay-api details method returns empty type and category

All other fields are OK.

Sep 08 '19 23:09 RankoR

As far as I know, even the Play Store app itself stopped showing categories. It's a really weird omission on Google's part. A bug or are they phasing out showing the categories? I don't know, but it's been missing for months.

Sep 09 '19 00:09 archon810

Seems that bulkDetails returns appType, but not a category

Sep 09 '19 10:09 RankoR

Actually, looks like the app category on the Play Store app moved from a distinct category into just one of the tags or whatever these are called.

Screenshot_20190909-121127

Sep 09 '19 19:09 archon810

Has anyone found a way to obtain the category information through the API? Scrapers look like the only solution atm. @archon810

Oct 07 '19 15:10 rng4life

@sebsz perhaps

Oct 07 '19 16:10 archon810

I pulled in data from https://github.com/danieliu/play-scraper, works pretty well. play_scraper.details(package_name)

Oct 08 '19 02:10 rng4life

@SeBsZ perhaps

What? We've successfully used the badges to grab the category, though most of the names have changed slightly from what they were previously.

Oct 08 '19 07:10 SeBsZ

@SeBsZ Badges in the returned json data?

Oct 08 '19 22:10 rng4life

Argh, seems gone now. I'm sorry, I thought the badges were still in the level above DocV2, but I forgot those have been removed as well now. Web scraping seems to be our only option at the moment, until someone manages to update the protobuf definition for the googleplay api.

Oct 09 '19 10:10 SeBsZ

Gotcha, thanks for the info. I haven't messed with the protobuf at all yet, looks like a mess.

Oct 14 '19 18:10 rng4life