How to mine App Store and Google Play reviews for product research

ParseBird·14 Oct 2026

Key Takeaways

What can you scrape from the Apple App Store and Google Play? App details (title, developer, price, genre, content rating, version, release notes, screenshots), ratings and rating counts, and customer reviews with star rating, date, text, app version, and developer reply. Google Play also returns install counts and developer contact details.

How many reviews can you get per app? On the App Store, up to 5,000 reviews per app per country, 20 per page. On Google Play, 150 reviews per page, with no fixed cap if you leave the page limit empty.

Why scrape competitor app reviews? Low-star reviews of competing apps are a direct list of unmet needs. Grouping them by theme shows which complaints are common across a category, and which ones a new product could fix.

Can I compare reviews across countries? Yes. The App Store scraper covers 115 country stores and Google Play takes a country and language code, so you can run the same app in several markets and compare.

Why app reviews are the best free product research data

The Apple App Store and Google Play Store together hold millions of apps and a constant stream of user reviews tied to specific app versions. Product managers, UX researchers, growth marketers, app investors, and founders validating an idea all use them to answer questions like "what do users hate about the market leader?" and "did the last update hurt ratings?"

ParseBird has two actors for this: the Apple App Store Scraper and the Google Play Store Scraper.

Data	Apple App Store	Google Play
Keyword search	Up to ~250 apps in ranking order	About 30 apps per search
Lookup by ID	App IDs, bundle IDs, URLs, developer IDs	App IDs, URLs, developer IDs
Ratings	Average and count, overall and current version	Score, count, star histogram
Installs	Not published by Apple	`installs`, `minInstalls`, `realInstalls`
Reviews per page	20 (max 5,000 per app)	150
Review sort	Most recent, helpful, favorable, critical	Newest, rating, helpfulness
Developer contact	Seller name and URL	Email, website, address, legal details
Similar apps	"You Might Also Like" list	No

How to scrape App Store reviews

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN")
run = client.actor("parsebird/app-store-scraper").call(run_input={
    "startUrls": ["https://apps.apple.com/us/app/instagram/id389801252"],
    "country": "us",
    "includeReviews": True,
    "reviewsSort": "mostCritical",
    "endPage": 10,
})
apps = client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).list_items().items

endPage sets both the last search page and the maximum number of review pages per app. Ten pages at 20 reviews each gives 200 of the most critical reviews. Each review includes title, review, rating, date, isEdited, and developerResponse.

How do I find an app's App Store ID? It is the number after id in the App Store URL, for example 389801252 for Instagram. You can also pass the bundle ID (com.burbn.instagram) or search by keyword.

How to scrape Google Play reviews

For review analysis on Google Play, onlyIncludeReviews returns one row per review instead of nesting them under the app, which is easier to analyze:

run = client.actor("parsebird/google-play-scraper").call(run_input={
    "startUrls": ["com.example.habittracker", "com.example.competitor"],
    "country": "US",
    "lang": "en",
    "onlyIncludeReviews": True,
    "reviewsSort": "NEWEST",
    "maxReviewPages": 4,
})

Each Google Play review includes score, text, date, thumbsUp, appVersion, and the developer's replyText. Four pages at 150 reviews per page gives up to 600 recent reviews per app.

Can I get competitor install numbers from Google Play? Yes. Google Play publishes install ranges, and the scraper returns installs (the displayed range such as "10,000,000+"), minInstalls, and realInstalls. Apple does not publish download counts.

Finding competitor weaknesses in low-star reviews

The most useful analysis is usually the simplest: take one- and two-star reviews across the top competitors and count recurring themes.

const THEMES = {
  pricing: /price|subscription|paywall|expensive|refund/i,
  bugs: /crash|bug|freez|glitch|not working/i,
  sync: /sync|backup|lost (my )?data/i,
  ads: /\bads?\b|advert/i,
  login: /log ?in|sign ?in|account|password/i,
};

const lowStar = reviews.filter((r) => (r.score ?? r.rating) <= 2);
const counts = Object.fromEntries(
  Object.entries(THEMES).map(([theme, re]) => [
    theme,
    lowStar.filter((r) => re.test(r.text ?? r.review ?? "")).length,
  ])
);

Keyword themes are a fast first pass. For deeper clustering, feed the review text into an LLM. The guide to structuring scraped data for AI pipelines covers preparing review datasets for that step.

Tracking rating changes by app version

Both scrapers return the app version on each review (appVersion on Google Play) or per app (version and averageUserRatingForCurrentVersion on the App Store). Run them weekly and you can see whether a release moved ratings:

Signal	Field
Rating for the current version only (iOS)	`averageUserRatingForCurrentVersion`
What changed in the release	`releaseNotes` (iOS), `recentChanges` (Android)
When it shipped	`currentVersionReleaseDate` (iOS), `updated` (Android)
Reviews tied to a version	`appVersion` on each Google Play review

Do developer replies show up in the data? Yes. developerResponse on App Store reviews and replyText with replyDate on Google Play reviews. Response rate to low-star reviews is a useful benchmark of a competitor's support quality.

App Store and Google Play scraper pricing

Both actors charge per event, so cost depends on what you request. At the time of writing, on Apify's free plan:

Event	App Store	Google Play
App saved	$0.0001	$0.0001
App detail	$0.0002	$0.0009
Search	$0.00399 per page	$0.00299 per search
Review page	$0.00499 (20 reviews)	$0.01399 (150 reviews)

Paid plans get lower rates. See the App Store and Google Play actor pages for current pricing.

FAQ

Do I need an Apple developer or Google Play Console account? No. Both actors read public store pages and need no login or API key.

Is it legal to scrape app store reviews? The actors read public store pages. Reviews include reviewer names, so treat them as personal data under laws like the GDPR, store only what you need, and do not republish reviews as your own content.

Can I scrape top charts or category rankings? Google Play category and top-chart URLs are not supported. Use keyword search or developer lookups instead. On the App Store, keyword search returns apps in ranking order.

Can results go straight to Notion or a task tool? Yes. Both actors can deliver results to Notion, Todoist, and other apps through Apify MCP connectors, which works well for routing new critical reviews to a product team.

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