Google Play Review Monitor — Get Alerts for New App Reviews

Google Play Review Monitor is an Apify actor that watches Android apps on the Google Play Store and returns only the reviews that are new since the last check. Point it at your app IDs, run it on a schedule, and every run gives you the fresh reviews and nothing else — no duplicate rows, no re-reading history, no diffing on your side. Export to JSON, CSV, or Excel, or push straight to Slack via webhook.

Built for agencies, app developers, and ASO/support teams who need to know about a 1-star review today, not at the end of the month. It bills per app checked, so watching 20 apps across 3 countries is one schedule, not sixty jobs.

⚠️ Run this on a Schedule — it is not a one-shot scraper

A single manual run returns nothing on purpose: the first run records the reviews that already exist so it can tell what is new later. That run is free (no app-check fee). Create a Schedule right after — "new since last time" needs a last time.

Contents

• What it does
• Use cases
• How to monitor Google Play reviews
• Setting up the schedule (60 seconds)
• Input
• Output
• Coverage: how it knows a review is new
• Pricing
• Recommended proxies
• Why this monitor
• FAQ
• Rate this actor
• Related actors

What it does

• 🔔 Only new reviews — remembers what it already reported, per app and per country
• 🌍 Multi-app, multi-country — watch 20 apps across 3 storefronts from one schedule
• ⭐ Negative-only alerts — set alert_max_rating: 3 to hear only about 1–3 star reviews
• 💬 Unanswered-review triage — surface reviews with no developer reply
• 🧾 Flat, CSV-friendly rows — one row per review, no nested JSON
• 🚨 Warns when it misses something — see Coverage
• ⚡ No proxy needed — HTTP-only, so a check costs fractions of a cent

Use cases

Same-day response to bad reviews — Every run returns only reviews that are new since the last check, so a schedule plus alert_max_rating gives you a feed of 1- and 2-star reviews as they land. The point is reacting to a bad review today rather than discovering it in a monthly export.

Support triage without duplicate work — Because deduplication happens actor-side against the watch state, the same review is never delivered twice. A support queue fed from this doesn't need its own diffing logic or a "have we seen this?" table.

Unanswered-review sweeps — alert_only_unanswered narrows the feed to reviews with no developer reply, which is the queue that actually needs a human. Useful for agencies holding a response-time SLA.

Multi-app, multi-country watching on one schedule — Billing is per app checked, so watching 20 apps across 3 countries is a single scheduled run rather than sixty separate jobs — the difference between a practical agency workflow and an unaffordable one.

How to monitor Google Play reviews

1. Add your app IDs — com.spotify.music, or paste the full Play Store URL.
2. Leave Watch name as default (or name it, to run several independent watches).
3. Run it once. This first run returns nothing and is not charged an app-check fee — it is recording what already exists.
4. Create a Schedule — see below.
5. Every run after that returns only new reviews. The run status tells you which case you got.

{
  "app_ids": ["com.spotify.music"],
  "watch_id": "default",
  "country": "us"
}

Negative reviews only, two apps, deeper scan:

{
  "app_ids": ["com.spotify.music", "com.netflix.mediaclient"],
  "alert_max_rating": 3,
  "max_reviews_per_app": 500,
  "country": "us"
}

Setting up the schedule (60 seconds)

1. Open console.apify.com/schedules → Create new
2. Set the cron expression — 0 * * * * for hourly, 0 9 * * * for daily at 09:00 UTC
3. Under Actors and tasks, add google-play-review-monitor and paste the same input you just ran
4. Save

Shortcut: from a finished run, use Actions → Schedule to carry the input across automatically.

Which frequency? Match it to how fast your app collects reviews — see Coverage. A quiet app is fine daily. A busy one wants hourly, or a higher max_reviews_per_app.

Getting alerts: attach a webhook on ACTOR.RUN.SUCCEEDED to post the dataset to Slack, email, or your own endpoint. Runs that find nothing produce an empty dataset, so you are only pinged when something happened.

Prefer building it as a workflow? The same actor ships as an n8n node — Schedule Trigger → Bootforge → Slack.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
app_ids	array	—	Required. Package IDs or Play Store URLs to watch
watch_id	string	default	Names the saved state. Keep it stable across scheduled runs
seed_silently	boolean	true	First run records the backlog without reporting it
alert_max_rating	integer	—	Only report reviews at or below this rating (3 = negative only)
alert_only_unanswered	boolean	false	Only report reviews with no developer reply
rating_filter	array	—	Restrict to specific star ratings, e.g. [1, 2]
max_reviews_per_app	integer	200	How deep to scan per check — see Coverage
country	string	us	Storefront code — each country is tracked separately
language	string	en	Language code for review text

Output

One row per new review.

{
  "platform": "google_play",
  "review_id": "2797dc0c-7faa-4a12-9d3e-5f81b0c47e29",
  "app_id": "com.spotify.music",
  "author_name": "Jane D.",
  "rating": 2,
  "text": "Crashes every time I open a playlist since the update.",
  "thumbs_up_count": 14,
  "review_date": "2026-07-27T08:49:13+00:00",
  "app_version": "8.9.60.408",
  "dev_reply_text": null,
  "dev_reply_date": null,
  "scraped_at": "2026-07-28T08:49:46+00:00"
}

Field	Type	Description
platform	string	Always google_play
review_id	string	Stable unique review identifier
app_id	string	Play Store package ID
author_name	string	Reviewer display name
author_avatar_url	string	Reviewer avatar image, when present
rating	integer	1–5 stars
text	string	Review body, may be null
thumbs_up_count	integer	"Helpful" votes
review_date	string	ISO 8601 timestamp of the review
app_version	string	App version reviewed, when reported
dev_reply_text	string	Developer's reply, null if unanswered
dev_reply_date	string	ISO 8601 timestamp of the reply
scraped_at	string	ISO 8601 timestamp of this check

An empty dataset is a normal result. It means no new reviews since the last check.

Coverage: how it knows a review is new

The monitor remembers every review ID it has reported, per app and per country, and delivers only IDs it has never sent. IDs are stable, so a review is never sent twice.

Where it has a limit — stated plainly: each check scans the newest max_reviews_per_app reviews. If more than that arrive between two checks, the overflow falls below the scan window and is not reported — and will not be reported later either, because the next check starts from the top again.

The monitor detects this and tells you. When a run's coverage does not connect to the previous run's, it emits a COVERAGE GAP warning in the log and in the run status, naming the time span it missed. Fix it by raising max_reviews_per_app or scheduling more often.

Rule of thumb: max_reviews_per_app should comfortably exceed the reviews your app receives between checks. The default of 200 with a daily schedule covers any app receiving under ~200 reviews/day.

Two things it does not do. It will not report an edited review — Google Play keeps the same ID when a user rewrites their rating or text — and it does not report deletions. This monitors new reviews, not changes to old ones.

Pricing

You pay per app watched, per check — about $1.50 per app per month on a daily schedule (30 checks plus run fees). Halve it by checking every other day; raise coverage by checking hourly.

Event	Price	When
Actor start	$0.001	Per run
App check	$0.05	Per app watched, per check — whether or not anything was new. Not charged on the free first run.
New review	$0.002	Per new review reported

New reviews add $0.002 each, kept deliberately small: even a busy app at 150 new reviews a month adds about $0.30. Your bill tracks how much you watch, not how noisy your apps happen to be — so you can forecast it.

Dedicated app-review monitoring SaaS starts around $39–100/month for a handful of apps. This is the same job at roughly $1.50 per app.

Confirm live pricing on the actor's Apify Store page — that is always authoritative.

Recommended proxies

No proxy is required. Google Play serves this actor's endpoint without one, verified on live runs, which is why a check costs fractions of a cent. Proxy provider is there if you want one; leaving it untouched runs direct, which is the right default here.

For your own scrapers that do need residential proxies, we use DataImpulse (referral link).

Why this monitor

• Purpose-built for the delta. A reviews scraper returns the same rows every run and leaves deduplication to you. This returns only what changed.
• Honest about coverage. It warns when it misses reviews instead of quietly under-reporting.
• Per-country state. The same app is a different review stream per storefront, tracked separately, so watches never contaminate each other.
• Cheap to run. HTTP-only, no browser, no proxy.
• Free first run. Setup costs nothing.

FAQ

Why did my first run return nothing? By design. The first run records the reviews that already exist so later runs can tell what is new. It is not charged an app-check fee. Set seed_silently to false if you want the existing backlog delivered once — that run bills normally.

Why does an empty run still cost money? Because the checking is what you are buying. A quiet result is the monitor doing its job and confirming nothing needs your attention — that is worth the same as a noisy one. Pricing is per app watched (~$1.50/app/month daily), so your bill is predictable and does not depend on how many reviews happen to land.

Do I need a proxy? No. Google Play serves this actor's endpoint from a plain datacenter IP, verified on live runs. Proxy provider is there for unusual cases, but leaving it untouched runs without a proxy and keeps checks cheap.

Is scraping Google Play reviews legal? This actor reads only publicly visible review pages — no login, no paywall, and no personal data beyond the display name a reviewer chose to publish. Public-data scraping is broadly lawful in the US and EU, but you are responsible for your own use, especially when republishing review text or handling personal data under GDPR.

Does it support the Apple App Store? No, and not by oversight. Apple's public web surface exposes a fixed 8 reviews per country ordered by helpfulness, not recency — that window routinely holds reviews years old and does not reliably contain new ones. There is no way to diff it, so an Apple mode would silently never alert.

Will it miss reviews if my app is busy? Only if more than max_reviews_per_app arrive between checks — and it warns you when that happens, naming the span it missed. Raise the value or schedule more often.

Can I change the sort order? No. The diff walks from the newest review and stops when it reaches ones already reported, which is only correct on a recency-ordered stream. Sort is locked so a watch cannot be silently broken.

How do I reset a watch? Change watch_id to a new name. That starts a fresh watch with its own state and seeds again on the next run.

Can I watch the same app in several countries? Yes. Each country is a separate review stream with separate state, so they never interfere.

Rate this actor ⭐

If this saved you time, please leave a review on the actor's Apify Store page — it is the single biggest help for a small publisher, and issues raised in reviews get fixed fast.

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• google-play-reviews-scraper — full historical review export and app search
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• google-maps-reviews-scraper — business reviews from Google Maps