How to Leveraging Mobile App Scraping for Retail Success (1)
                     How to Leveraging Mobile App Scraping for Retail Success?
Mobile apps have become a vital consumer shopping channel in today's post-
pandemic world. With smartphone users spending an average of over 3 hours on their
phones daily, it's clear that mobile apps are increasingly preferred over traditional
eCommerce apps. Recognizing this shift, Mobile App Scraping has introduced an
innovative mobile app scraping solution to complement its successful eCommerce app
scraping technology. This advanced solution is designed to help businesses thrive in
the evolving retail landscape.
Let's dive deeper into the process and technology behind mobile app scraping, which 
can be approached in two ways:
Scenario 1:
When composite APIs are open (e.g., Amazon) - In such cases, the scraping process is
similar to standard app scraping, with some initial setup required. Mobile App Scraping
can utilize the available APIs of platforms like Amazon to access and extract the desired
data. The process involves making API requests, handling responses, and parsing the
retrieved data.
Scenario 2:
Whenever composite APIs get encrypted (e.g., Dollar General, HEB, Target, Stop &
Shop, etc.) - This scenario presents a more complex challenge. Mobile App Scraping
employs specialized techniques such as mobile device extraction, OCR (Optical
Character Recognition), as well as other machine learning methods to overcome the
encryption and extract data from these apps. Mobile App Scraping leverages advanced
technologies to navigate the encrypted APIs and interfaces, ensuring accurate and
reliable data extraction.
In both scenarios, Mobile App Scraping utilizes its expertise and advanced
methodologies to scrape mobile apps efficiently and effectively, providing businesses
with valuable data insights to enhance their operations and decision-making
processes.
Methodology
Step 1: Recording a mobile session/navigation using unique 
visual navigation scrapers Technology consideration
Mobile App Scraping employs a virtual device cloud infrastructure to ensure
scalability and efficiency. It utilizes an emulated cluster of devices that connect
through an intelligent proxy network.
In the first step of the methodology, special visual navigation scrapers are utilized
to record mobile sessions and navigation. These scrapers interact with the mobile
app interface, mimicking user actions and capturing the relevant data. This
approach allows Mobile App Scraping to navigate the app, access different screens,
and interact with various elements to gather the desired information.
To achieve scalability, a virtual device cloud infrastructure is employed. This
infrastructure emulates a cluster of devices, ensuring that the scraping process can
be performed at scale. Additionally, an intelligent proxy network handles
communication between the devices and the app, ensuring efficient data retrieval.
By combining special visual navigation scrapers, an actual device cloud, and an
intelligent proxy network, Mobile App Scraping ensures a robust and scalable
approach to recording mobile sessions and navigating through mobile apps for data
scraping purposes.
Step 2: Identify product ROI (Region of Interest)
To accurately scrape text for each product, Mobile App Scraping utilizes an Object
Detection algorithm to identify the ROI of individual products within a frame,
regardless of the number of products present.
The input files are passed through a custom fine-tuned version of the YOLOv5 (You
Only Look Once) architecture, which excels in fast and accurate inference. YOLOv5
can swiftly detect and localize each product's ROI within the frame.
Since a video typically consists of multiple frames per second, the exact product ROIs
are possible. To address this, a deduplication stage is introduced. This stage
eliminates identical product ROIs, allowing faster and more efficient data processing.
The resulting ROIs from the video frames are then cached as images, ready for
further analysis and extraction.
By utilizing the Object Detection capabilities of YOLOv5 and implementing
deduplication techniques, Mobile App Scraping ensures the accurate identification
and localization of product ROIs, laying the foundation for subsequent data
processing and extraction.
Step 3: Identify product components
In this stage, Mobile App Scraping focuses on identifying specific components of the
products, such as price, product information, product image, and more. The same
components to be identified may vary based on the specific mobile app being scraped.
To achieve precise component identification, Mobile App Scraping applies YOLOv5
again, but with a different instance or configuration compared to Step 2. This allows
for more granular consideration in detecting and localizing the desired components
within the product ROIs.
By leveraging YOLOv5's capabilities, Mobile App Scraping ensures accurate and reliable
identification of various product components, enabling the extraction of crucial
information such as prices, descriptions, and images. This stage is critical in gathering
the specific data elements needed for further analysis and utilization.
Step 4: Extract components with OCR
In this stage, Mobile App Scraping completes the textual extraction process now that all
details of the products have been identified. A custom-trained OCR (Optical Character
Recognition) framework is deployed to achieve this.
The OCR framework is specifically trained to recognize and extract text from the
identified components of the products. It utilizes advanced algorithms and machine
learning techniques to accurately extract textual information such as product names,
prices, descriptions, and other relevant details.
Mobile App Scraping ensures precise and reliable textual data extraction from the
identified product components by deploying a custom-trained OCR framework. This
stage is crucial in capturing the detailed information needed for further analysis,
processing, or integration with other systems.
Step 5: Accessing the final output
In the final stage, the text extraction output and relevant metadata are stored in a
database. Mobile App Scraping applies unit tests and quality checks to ensure the
accuracy and integrity of the extracted data.
Once the data is verified and validated, it is transformed into the desired format
suitable for the client's needs. This transformation process ensures the information is
structured appropriately and ready to be accessed, sent, uploaded, or requested via
API (Application Programming Interface).
By storing the data in a database and applying rigorous quality checks, Mobile App
Scraping guarantees the reliability and usability of the extracted information. The
transformed data can now be seamlessly integrated into the client's systems or
applications, empowering them with valuable insights from mobile app scraping.
Conclusion
In conclusion, as the retail landscape evolves with the rise of mobile and social
commerce and the emergence of the metaverse, the need for advanced AI and
analytics becomes paramount. Mobile App Scraping recognizes this need and is
dedicated to providing retailers and brands with sophisticated and accurate analytics
across the retail ecosystem. They have developed an cutting-edge mobile app scraping
solution to cater to the evolving needs of the retail industry.
Moreover, Mobile App Scraping has extended its proprietary technology to the
metaverse, enabling the scraping of retail stores in virtual platforms like Decentraland,
Roblox, Sandbox, Meta, and more. This expansion reflects their commitment to staying
at the forefront of technological advancements and ensuring that retailers have access
to critical data and insights across multiple platforms.
With the growing popularity of mobile commerce and the increasing competition in the
retail space, mobile app scraping has become essential for maintaining competitive
prices, assortments, and digital shelf ranking. By leveraging Mobile App Scraping's
cutting-edge solutions, retailers can stay ahead of the curve and make informed
decisions based on accurate and real-time data.
In summary, Mobile App Scraping offers innovative mobile app scraping solutions
alongside their established eCommerce app scraping technology, empowering retailers
to thrive in the dynamic retail landscape and meet the demands of modern consumers.