Get Apple's COVID data in R

apple-covid.R

## Get current Apple COVID data
## Kieran Healy / @kjhealy

## E.g. apple_covid <- get_apple_data()

## 1. Find today's URL
## Thanks to David Cabo (@dcabo) for alerting me to the existence of the json file. 
get_apple_target <- function(cdn_url = "https://covid19-static.cdn-apple.com",
                             json_file = "covid19-mobility-data/current/v3/index.json") {
  tf <- tempfile(fileext = ".json")
  curl::curl_download(paste0(cdn_url, "/", json_file), tf)
  json_data <- jsonlite::fromJSON(tf)
  paste0(cdn_url, json_data$basePath, json_data$regions$`en-us`$csvPath)
}

## 2. Get the data and return a tibble
get_apple_data <- function(url = get_apple_target(),
                             fname = "applemobilitytrends-",
                             date = stringr::str_extract(get_apple_target(), "\\d{4}-\\d{2}-\\d{2}"),
                             ext = "csv",
                             dest = "data-raw/data",
                             save_file = c("n", "y")) {

  save_file <- match.arg(save_file)
  message("target: ", url)

  destination <- fs::path(here::here("data-raw/data"),
                          paste0("apple_mobility", "_daily_", date), ext = ext)

  tf <- tempfile(fileext = ext)
  curl::curl_download(url, tf)

  ## We don't save the file by default, but you can if you want
  switch(save_file,
         y = fs::file_copy(tf, destination),
         n = NULL)

  janitor::clean_names(readr::read_csv(tf))
}