How to Scrape App Store & Google Play Reviews with Sentiment Analysis
A complete guide on scraping app reviews from Apple App Store and Google Play, handling sentiment analysis, and evaluating DIY versus ready-made costs.
Stock photo for illustration only, not from the actual event
- Apple App Store offers a public RSS feed capped at about 500 reviews per country.
- Google Play lacks an official API, requiring reverse-engineering of internal RPC endpoints.
- Processing raw review text at scale requires building an LLM and sentiment classification pipeline.
- Apify Actor provides a ready-made solution at $0.15 per 1,000 reviews with zero setup.
If you are trying to scrape app reviews from the Apple App Store, Google Play, or both to feed a product feedback loop, monitor competitor ratings, or build a RAG pipeline on real user complaints, you already face a two-part challenge. Extracting raw review text is only half the job, while turning thousands of reviews into actionable insights requires an entirely separate pipeline to build and maintain.
Knowing how both app stores operate reveals that they are not equally difficult to scrape before you even write your first line of code.
- Apple App Store: Exposes a public, unauthenticated RSS feed (itunes.apple.com/.../rss/customerreviews/...) requiring no headless browser or proxy. A plain HTTP request returns JSON data. However, it is capped at approximately the 500 most recent reviews per country per app, requiring country code loops for broader coverage.
- Google Play: Has no such public feed or documented API to read app reviews. Data sits behind Google's internal batchexecute RPC endpoint called by the Play Store web page itself—undocumented, unversioned, and returning nested JSON arrays addressed by numeric positions instead of named keys. Reverse-engineering it works until a frontend change silently breaks review.author indexes.
Stock photo for illustration only, not from the actual event
Building a DIY scraping tool often comes with hidden maintenance costs. Reverse-engineering undocumented Google Play endpoints means scripts can break unexpectedly with minor frontend updates. Furthermore, stacking an LLM pipeline to categorize sentiments, bug reports, and feature requests at scale transforms a simple scraping script into a complex software engineering project.
Extracting text alone still leaves raw data unread. Converting a comment like "the new update is so laggy, please add dark mode back" into structured data with sentiment, type, and topics at volume requires calling an LLM per review, managing rate limits, and handling malformed JSON responses.
"Pulling twenty App Store reviews for a one-off check is genuinely fine to hand-roll. The cost shows up when you need Google Play coverage plus real sentiment classification, running continuously."
Robert Kerber
For developers looking for a shortcut, the App Store & Google Play Reviews Scraper on Apify pulls reviews from both stores and attaches sentiment, topics, summaries, and categorization labels automatically. Priced at $0.15 per 1,000 reviews with no monthly commitment, it bypasses the need to build and maintain custom scraping and NLP infrastructure.
Source: Dev.to
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