The other night as I sat on the couch, I wanted an iPad to play puzzle games, to help wind down. Then I thought about how expensive they are and how it would likely get used a few times and then sit idle for months... or years. Like the two iPads I purchased over a decade ago. So instead I decided to grab one of the old iPads and see if it'd scratch the itch. Turns out the majority of the apps you attempt to download have minimum iOS version requirement much higher than my iPad that won't upgrade past 9.2. So instead of mindlessly tapping download and canceling out of the "This game is not compatible with your device", I built a scraper that logs games that fit my criteria:
- iOS v9 support
- 4+ rating
- over 20 reviews
- no in app purchases
- no game center
A few thoughts as I wind down:
- The scraper is slow, like 34 hours slow. It needs to be parallelized.
- You can modify the scraper to search other app categories.
- I'm inspecting every game, instead of throwing out games that don't match the min iOS version... I should store the iOS version requirement and add that as a UI filter.
Browse the games: https://cjstewart88.github.io/vintage/
Source Code: https://github.com/cjstewart88/vintage
