I got tired of scraping app reviews twice, so I unified both stores
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…
Every app review pipeline follows the same basic structure: a scraper for Google Play, another for the App Store, and a normalization layer to make the scores and ratings compatible. The process is repetitive and prone to errors, requiring constant maintenance. Unfortunately, it's not as straightforward as it seems. Apple only provides a public RSS feed for customer reviews, but it limits the results to around 500 recent reviews per app in a specific country.
As for Google Play, open-source libraries exist but can break when Google modifies internal endpoints. Subscription services like Appfigures and Appbot offer more robust solutions with dashboards, alerts, and sentiment analysis, but they come at a cost. The author decided to create App Review Monitor, an Apify-based tool that consolidates reviews from both stores into a unified schema.
The dataset includes fields such as store, app ID, country, date, rating, title, text, app version, and author. The author field is a hash to protect reviewer identities, and review text is anonymized to comply with GDPR regulations. The tool prioritizes transparency, notifying users when apps fail to fetch reviews, and provides a complete dataset rather than an empty one, ensuring effective monitoring.
The author built this tool themselves using AI assistance and uses it solely for publicly available review data.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
