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Is there a way to download just the icons that are stored in a particular application from Google Play/Market without downloading the entire APK and installing it?

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3 Answers


There is no official API for market content. Be it to retrieve icons or anything else.

If you are just interested in getting the image files you can download them manually via the web front end to the Market. But I wouldn't write code to do this, as it is very likely that they will make a change to the web front end that will result in your code breaking. p.s. I am no lawyer, but also I don't think there is very much that you would be "allowed" to do with these images even if you did download them (without permission from each developer of course)

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+1 for the comment about the questionable nature of the request. I can't think of a legitimate use for the appropriated icons. –  josh3736 Jun 16 '12 at 1:56
@Tim: I suspected as much, but am a bit surprised. –  zen_of_kermit Jun 18 '12 at 18:42
@josh3736: there is at least one legitimate use, if you think about it. –  zen_of_kermit Jun 18 '12 at 18:45
@zen_of_kermit There are plenty of legitimate uses, however there are plenty more that are not so much. Either way I am surprised by it as well. For an entity that has appointed itself the role of "Organizing the world's information" the Market itself has terrible organization / ease of access imo. –  FoamyGuy Jun 18 '12 at 18:47
AppSales is one example. They keep track of the apps in Google Play the same way App Shopper does with App Store... I don't know how they do it, but if there is no other way, then I must agree with Jug6ernaut's method (below). –  bruno.braga Oct 14 '12 at 7:03
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You can do this but it would require downloading he page source and then parsing it.

What you could do is first download the webpage, i like JSoup. Like

Document d = null;
try {
    d  = Jsoup.connect("https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=" + packageName).get();
} catch (IOException e1) {
    // TODO Auto-generated catch block

Then you should parse that document for the following tag ""

Elements div = d.getElementsByAttributeValueContaining("class", "doc-banner-icon");
String path = div.get(0).attr("src");

This path variable should be the path for the image to download. I have not tested this.

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You could create a Yahoo Pipes like this http://kcy.me/hylg it will parse the page for you and extract a JSON in wich you could read the sinlge image URL.


You can parameterize the pipe in order to receive the link to the app you want to extract the image.

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