Stability Issue with iTunes service

Last Thursday, some of our customers and SOTI discovered a new issue with Apple's iTunes lookup service (https://itunes.apple.com/lookup).  The issue is that Apple's iTunes lookup service sometimes erroneously returns an HTTP 404 Not Found error. Please see the HTTP request/response logs attached in the Feedback (FB8566694) raised a few days ago.

This issue prevents our enterprise customers from using key features in our MDM solution that relies on the ability to search for App Store applications including:

  • the App Catalogue

  • Restrictions, Single App Mode, and many more profiles

We have noticed that the iTunes service we use to look up both App Store and Custom/B2B apps (by Application ID) as described in Apple's MDM documentation on page 155 (”contentMetadataLookupUrl”) does not suffer from this issue.  However, as far as we can tell, the contentMetadataLookupUrl service cannot be used to search for App Store applications by a search term like Apple's iTunes lookup service can.

So, we would like to understand how we can resolve this issue for our customers.

  • Is there a more robust service we should be leveraging?

  • Is Apple aware of this issue? If so, when will it be addressed?

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We are aware that this service has a limit of 20 calls per minute, which may be causing the 404 response, especially since we can issue requests more frequently than that. However, we have never had this issue in the last 8 years of using this service. So, can Apple confirm that this is a recently implemented limitation?
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We've had the same issue. I submitted to AppleCare Support on Friday.
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joshtaka
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