How this ledger is kept

This page explains how the readings on this site are taken, what a reading can and cannot show, and what the ledger leaves out. It is not a footnote; every figure in the tables rests on it.

What a reading is

A reading is one request to a public page, made by a script on a server, without logging in, on a stated day. For the three listings on this site the day is 6 November 2026. The Google Play pages were requested in the India view (parameters hl=en and gl=IN), the App Store product page at its India address and the App Store lookup interface with the storefront set to India. The raw answers were saved, and every figure in a table is parsed from those saved files.

All dates on this site are UTC: a reading taken on the evening of 6 November UTC was already the early morning of 7 November in India, and the site prints the UTC date so that every table agrees with every caption. Each page that shows figures says which store, which country view and which day. A figure without those three would not be printed. The pictures are captures of the same public pages taken the same day with a headless browser at a desktop width and a phone width; they are not pictures from inside an app.

How the figures are re-checked

Before a reading is kept, a second program reads the saved files by a different route and compares: the visible text of each Play page against the data the page carries, the App Store lookup against the App Store page, the star counts against the number of ratings, the version and date in the history against the current version. If anything fails to match, the reading is not written. The check was itself tested against planted faults: a changed rating, a swapped developer, a changed count, a dropped privacy category, an edited date, a changed file.

What was asked of each source

The sources were asked sparingly: the feed program spaces its requests to one host at least eight seconds apart, a day's total to a host stayed far below fifty, and a refusal (HTTP 403 or 429) stops it. The pictures were taken from separate page loads of the same store pages on the same day, again far fewer than fifty to each store. The broker's own site answered its front page, its FAQ page and its About page with 403; two of those three requests were made after the first refusal, which the rule of the reading should have prevented, and nothing more was asked of that host. Only its public text file was readable, and that is the only page of the broker this site quotes.

What the ledger leaves out on purpose

It leaves out everything behind a login: the screens of an account, the identity check, the deposit and withdrawal screens, the order ticket, the fees. It leaves out written reviews, which are other people's words. It does not score, rank or recommend. It does not describe what an app does beyond what its own page says; where it quotes a description, it quotes it. And it does not say that a declaration or a rating is true: it says what the page says and when.