Download APK files from Google Play Store with Python

download_apk.py

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
"""
   File name: download_apk.py
   Author: Dawand Sulaiman
   
   Download APK files from Google Play Store with Python
   This script scraps https://apkpure.com to get the apk download link
   Make sure you have BeautifulSoup and urllib libraries
"""

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
from urllib.parse import quote_plus
import requests

def search(query):
    res = requests.get('https://apkpure.com/search?q={}&region='.format(quote_plus(query)), headers={
        'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_6) AppleWebKit/601.7.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) '
                      'Version/9.1.2 Safari/601.7.5 '
    }).text
    soup = BeautifulSoup(res, "html.parser")
    search_result = soup.find('div', {'id': 'search-res'}).find('dl', {'class': 'search-dl'})
    app_tag = search_result.find('p', {'class': 'search-title'}).find('a')
    download_link = 'https://apkpure.com' + app_tag['href']
    return download_link

def download(link):
    res = requests.get(link + '/download?from=details', headers={
        'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_6) AppleWebKit/601.7.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) '
                      'Version/9.1.2 Safari/601.7.5 '
    }).text
    soup = BeautifulSoup(res, "html.parser").find('a', {'id': 'download_link'})
    if soup['href']:
        r = requests.get(soup['href'], stream=True, headers={
            'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_6) AppleWebKit/601.7.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) '
                          'Version/9.1.2 Safari/601.7.5 '
        })
        with open(link.split('/')[-1] + '.apk', 'wb') as file:
            for chunk in r.iter_content(chunk_size=1024):
                if chunk:
                    file.write(chunk)

def download_apk(app_id):
    download_link = search(app_id)

    if download_link is not None:
        print('Downloading {}.apk ...'.format(download_link))
        download(download_link)
        print('Download completed!')
    else:
        print('No results')

# Test it
download_apk('org.moire.opensudoku')

Be aware:
Your code does NOT download the APK files from the Google Play store. It downloads them from a mirror site, that may modify the APKs before distribution. Not safe for a research environment.

Do you have a better alternate? I am looking for an automated program for large downloads of android based APKs - any help will be much appreciated - the gplaycli and gplayapi are all obsolete and not working anymore

Not sure if you would consider this alternative "better" but I scripted a ui automator that downloads the APKs from the official Play store client app using an actual emulator/device.

You can use adb shell am start market://details?id=<YOUR_APP_HANDLE> to open the apps detail page in the store client, get the install button coordinates with an xml dump from the uiautomator API with adb exec-out uiautomator dump /dev/tty and press it with adb shell input tap <COORDINATES>.

My goal was to actually install the app on the device but if you just want to get the APK you can just pull it from the device. It is located in the store client's cache.

When I tried to run this code, I had this error. Does anyone know what the problem is?

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/kali/Desktop/./download_apk.py", line 54, in
download_apk('org.moire.opensudoku')
File "/home/kali/Desktop/./download_apk.py", line 44, in download_apk
download_link = search(app_id)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
File "/home/kali/Desktop/./download_apk.py", line 22, in search
search_result = soup.find('div', {'id': 'search-res'}).find('dl', {'class': 'search-dl'})
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'find'