From App’s release cycle can somewhat see App’s behind-the-scenes team’s operational status, also somewhat reflects team’s control over App quality and user experience. Then this article leads everyone to see those “excellent” Apps’ release situations.

Data

Version Records

Apple AppStore website can get App’s historical version release records. For example Douyin: https://itunes.apple.com/cn/app/id1142110895

Top App

“Excellent” Apps are naturally top-ranked Apps, iResearch Index provides a ranking, but can’t conveniently get corresponding AppStore links (id in link above). Qimai Data provides “App Rankings”, then we look at “China App Store Free Rankings” Apps’ version release cycles. Link:

https://www.qimai.cn/rank/index/brand/free/country/cn/genre/36/device/iphone

Great thing is can directly export, and includes id. I only want to see apps, not games.

Crawler

scrapy is a Python crawler framework, long history, simple and easy to use. Official site: https://scrapy.org Getting started: https://docs.scrapy.org/en/latest/intro/tutorial.html

After reading getting started can immediately start.

Through id construct each App’s App Store URL, https://itunes.apple.com/cn/app/id1142110895 Crawl all version records.

https://github.com/everettjf/chatterbox/tree/master/spider/data/20190213/appinfo

Analysis

With data, everything is easy. Write some scripts.

https://github.com/everettjf/chatterbox/blob/master/spider/rank.py

This script provides four sorting methods:

python rank.py version-count data/20190213/appinfo
python rank.py days-per-version data/20190213/appinfo
python rank.py days-per-version-last-6-month data/20190213/appinfo
python rank.py emergency-release-count data/20190213/appinfo

Release Count

From results can know, AppStore keeps at most 25 version records.

Average Days Per Version

Calculate all version records, how many days per version (average interval between versions in days) Looks like release cycle is really short, Xiaohongshu 4 days, Pinduoduo 5 days, Kuaishou 6 days, Zhihu 7 days, etc., presumably colleagues work very hard. Alipay 27 days, WeChat 21 days, Taobao 20 days, Didi 11 days, Xianyu 13 days.