# Changelog of App Store & Google Play Reviews Scraper API | iOS + Android (`aaronoptimus/app-store-reviews-scraper`) Actor - **URL**: https://apify.com/aaronoptimus/app-store-reviews-scraper/changelog.md - **Full Actor documentation**: https://apify.com/aaronoptimus/app-store-reviews-scraper.md ## Changelog ### Price cut — October 2026 - Reviews now cost $0.15 per 1,000 on the free plan and $0.10 per 1,000 on Gold and above, down from $0.30 and $0.15. App details, search / chart entries and the run start fee are unchanged. ### October 2026: lower prices, monitoring, sweeps, sentiment and comparison - **Lower, tiered prices.** Reviews now cost $0.30 per 1,000 on the free plan and from $0.15 per 1,000 on Gold (down to $0.10 on Diamond), instead of $0.50. App details: $0.002 down to $0.0006. Search / chart entries: $0.0006 down to $0.0002. Nothing got more expensive; no new paid events. - **Only new reviews (monitoring).** `onlyNewReviews: true` delivers and charges only reviews that earlier runs haven't delivered, per store × app × country (state in the named key-value store `app-reviews-monitor`; `monitorKey` keeps monitors apart). Runs with nothing new succeed and report `newReviewsCount: 0`. README recipe for schedules, webhooks and Slack. - **App Store country sweeps.** `countries` accepts `top5`, `top10`, `top25`, `top50` or `all` for App Store apps. Reviews are de-duplicated across storefronts, missing storefronts are skipped quietly (and free), reviews per country are reported in the log and `OUTPUT.reviewsByCountry`, and App Store requests are spaced out politely. - **Free sentiment and topics** on every review (`sentiment`, `topics`), from the stars plus keyword dictionaries in English, Spanish, German, French and Portuguese. No AI service; turn off with `addSentimentAndTopics: false`. - **New filters:** `includeKeywords`, `excludeKeywords` and `developerReplyFilter` (`withReply` / `withoutReply`). Filtered-out reviews are free. - **Competitor comparison (free):** with 2+ apps, one `comparison` item with average rating, % of 1–2★, top negative topics, developer reply rate, median reply time, and rating by week and by version. - **Schema:** additive only. Reviews gain `sentiment` and `topics` (at the end); summaries gain `sentimentCounts`, `topicCounts`, `topNegativeTopics`, `developerReplyRatePercent`, `newReviewsCount`; flat rows gain `sentiment` and `topics` columns at the end, and the column list is now pinned by a test. New dataset view: *Competitor comparison*. - `OUTPUT` now also reports `chargedEvents`, `reviewsAlreadySeen`, `reviewsDedupedAcrossCountries`, `storefrontsUnavailable` and `reviewsByCountry`. ### October 6, 2026 — App Store reviews fallback - Apple's public App Store reviews feed started returning no reviews for most apps. When that happens (or when the feed is unavailable: gone, refused, or not a feed), the scraper now reads the reviews shown on the public App Store web page instead and delivers them in the same review format (developer replies included; app version and helpful votes are `null` there). Apple shows only about 10 reviews per device view per country this way, so expect roughly 10–40 App Store reviews per app per country for now; with app details on, the app item's `warnings` says when this happened (otherwise the run log does). - Filters, sort order, *Max reviews per app*, the cost cap and pricing apply to these reviews too; for date order or a date filter all device views are read before sorting. Only delivered reviews are charged; empty review objects (no text, no rating) are dropped. - If Apple redesigns the web page so its reviews can't be read, the app item says so in `warnings` instead of the run retrying. - App Store app items now have `privacy: null`: Apple's privacy labels can't be read without Apple's web-API token, which this scraper doesn't use. Prices are unchanged. - The feed is still tried first, so full results (up to 500 recent reviews per app per country) come back automatically if Apple restores it. ### 1.0 — October 2026 First public release. - **Both stores, one schema.** iOS App Store and Google Play app details, reviews, search results and top charts come back with identical fields (missing data is `null`), so one pipeline handles both. - **App details**: title, developer and developer id, rating, rating count and 1–5 star histogram, price, currency, free / in-app-purchase flags, installs (Android), version, release and update dates, release notes, category, content rating, size, minimum OS, store URL, icon, screenshot count, data safety summary (Android). - **Reviews**: review id, reviewer display name, rating, title, text, date, app version, helpful votes, developer reply text and date (Android), link. Sorted by newest, rating or helpfulness; filtered by date and star range; Google Play paginated with `nextPaginationToken`; Apple's 500-reviews-per-country feed limit handled and reported. - **Input flexibility**: App Store / Google Play URLs, numeric Apple ids, Android package names, iOS bundle ids, search terms (top N apps per store), top charts per store and category. Several countries and languages per run; every app × country is fetched. - **Per-app summary (free)**: average rating of the fetched reviews, counts by star, average rating by app version, most frequent words in 1–2 star reviews with stop-word removal. - **Flat rows** output format for CSV / Excel / Google Sheets. - **Reliability**: per-worker sessions with automatic session/IP rotation on 429 / 403 / 5xx / network errors, capped backoff, optional Apify Proxy, parallel sessions, resume after restarts. Errors are delivered as items instead of failing the run. - **Pay per event, no platform fees**: `review`, `app-detail` and `app-listing` events; summaries are free; apps that can't be found or that the store refuses are not charged; Apify's *Maximum cost per run* is respected across all event types and parallel sessions. - **Crash- and migration-safe billing**: progress is saved before every charge, so a restarted or migrated run never charges the same app twice. - **Free-plan rule**: runs by free-plan accounts are capped at 5 apps and 50 reviews per app, stated in the log and status message.