Every app review pipeline I've seen starts the same way: one scraper for Google
Play, a different one for the App Store, and then a normalization layer to make
score and im:rating pretend to be the same field. You write that glue code
once, it breaks quietly, and you write it again.
The raw sources, if you want to DIY it: Apple still serves a public RSS feed at
itunes.apple.com/{country}/rss/customerreviews/... — no auth needed, but it
caps at roughly 500 recent reviews per app per country, and nobody tells you that
until you hit it. For Play there are the open-source google-play-scraper
libraries, which work fine until Google shifts an internal endpoint and they
don't.
There's also the subscription route. Appfigures starts at $9.99/month and Appbot
at $49/month, and they're good products — dashboards, alerts, sentiment, the
whole suite. But if your actual need is "give me the reviews as data", paying for
a dashboard you'll never open feels wrong.
So I built App Review Monitor
on Apify. You pass apps from either store, it returns every review in one schema:
{
"store": "apple",
"appId": "310633997",
"country": "us",
"date": "2026-08-20T14:03:11.000Z",
"rating": 2,
"title": "Latest update broke uploads",
"text": "Since the last version ...",
"appVersion": "26.16.81",
"author": "reviewer_a1b2c3d4e5f6"
}
Same ten fields whether it came from Play or the App Store. Pipe it into an LLM
for a theme digest, a sheet for support triage, whatever.
That author field is a hash, not a name. On purpose. Review text is what you
analyze; the reviewer's display name is GDPR liability you almost never need, so
anonymization is the default and including real names is an explicit opt-in.
The other opinionated choice: failures are loud. Apps that couldn't be fetched
get listed in the run summary, and if every app fails the run exits FAILED
instead of handing you an empty dataset with a green checkmark. Monitoring that
fails silently isn't monitoring.
Disclosure: I build and maintain this with AI assistance on my own account, and
it collects only publicly available review data.
