How to track Android app updates automatically

A nightly job that tells you when any app on your watchlist ships a new version.

Idea

Keep a watchlist of package names. Every night fetch them in batches of 100, compare version and updated with yesterday, and report the differences.

import json, os, requests

H = {"X-API-Key": os.environ["API_KEY"]}
watch = open("watchlist.txt").read().split()
old = json.load(open("versions.json")) if os.path.exists("versions.json") else {}
new = {}
for i in range(0, len(watch), 100):
    r = requests.get("https://apkapi.net/api/v1/apps",
                     params={"ids": ",".join(watch[i:i+100])}, headers=H, timeout=60).json()
    for a in r["apps"]:
        new[a["id"]] = [a["version"], a["updated"]]
for pkg, v in new.items():
    if old.get(pkg) != v:
        print(pkg, old.get(pkg), "->", v)
json.dump(new, open("versions.json", "w"))

Whole categories

Instead of a watchlist, ask for everything popular that changed: /search?updated_from=YYYY-MM-DD&min_installs=1000000&sort=updated.

Cost

A 500-app watchlist checked nightly costs about 15,000 credits a month.