App Store Search Suggestions

Extract public Apple App Store autocomplete suggestions from the official search-hints plist endpoint.

Source and behavior

• Public HTTPS requests go only to search.itunes.apple.com, with an official storefront header.
• The actor accepts up to 100 query strings, a supported storefront, and a bounded suggestion limit.
• Each suggestion includes the public term, normalized query, query and suggestion positions, storefront, duplicate provenance, Apple search URL when Apple supplies one, source request metadata, and response evidence.
• Requests are sequential, paced, direct, and made once with a fixed transparent user agent. There is no browser automation, proxy, retry, login, or access-control bypass.
• HTTP errors, challenge responses, malformed XML, and queries with no public hints are logged and counted in OUTPUT_SUMMARY; they are never stored as suggestion records.
• Null, blank, and empty values are removed before output. No suggestion is fabricated.

The default local run uses photo editor, fitness tracker, and game. The authoritative cloud mapping is codingfrontend/app-store-search-suggestions (RBCkjrroZnkxsYBj0), public rank 163.

Local run

npm ci
apify run --purge --input-file qa-inputs/local-search.json
npm test

The run writes real suggestion rows to the default dataset and a bounded OUTPUT_SUMMARY object to the default key-value store. Invalid input fails before making a request, and a run with zero real suggestions fails after saving its summary.