The software.gallery fetcher

• When someone submits an app, it reads the one link they pasted: an App Store listing or the app’s own website.
• When a person reviewing an app asks it to read the link again, or to take fresh screenshots of a web app that’s in the gallery.
• Once a day it asks Apple’s public lookup for the ratings and versions of the App Store apps in the gallery. That goes to Apple, not to your site.

• From the App Store: what Apple’s public lookup returns, such as the name, maker, description, version, size, languages, ratings, icon and screenshots.
• From a website: the page’s title, description and Open Graph tags, its icons and web app manifest, and a link to the app on the App Store if the page has one. It also tries /favicon.ico when the page names no icon.
• For web apps, once the person who submitted it confirms their email, screenshots of the page, taken with an ordinary browser so they show what people see.

• It doesn’t crawl. It opens the link it was given and the icon and image files that page points to.
• It never signs in, fills in a form or pays for anything.
• It only opens public https addresses, follows at most 3 redirects, and stops after 10 seconds, at 2 MB for a page or an icon, and at 8 MB for a screenshot.

• A person checks it before anything shows in the gallery.
• Icons and screenshots are stored with the app’s page and credited to its maker, never hotlinked.

If it calls more often than it should, or you’d like it to stop, write to mail@software.gallery with your site’s address. If an app of yours is in the gallery and you’d like it changed or taken down, we do that too.