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App Store Monitor — Version, Price, Rating & Listing Changes

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App Store Monitor — Version, Price, Rating & Listing Changes

App Store Monitor — Version, Price, Rating & Listing Changes

Watch App Store and Google Play listings on a schedule and get one row per change: new versions with release notes, price and in-app purchase changes, rating moves past your threshold, title and description edits, developer, category, size, minimum OS and installs band. Or a full snapshot.

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from $1.20 / 1,000 changes

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Insight Solutions

Insight Solutions

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Watch App Store and Google Play listings on a schedule and get back one row per change — not the listing again. A competitor ships a version: one version row with the old and new version, the store's release date and the new release notes. Their price, in-app price range, rating, title, description, developer, category, size, minimum OS or install band moves: one row for that family, with before and after. You pay a small fee for each listing a monitor run reads — $0.0006 per app checked, changed or not — plus $2.00 per 1,000 changes. A quiet daily run of six apps bills $0.0046; an app that could not be read is free.

Give it App Store and Play URLs, IDs or package names. No API key, no login, no browser.

Input — a daily competitor watch:

{
"apps": [
"https://apps.apple.com/us/app/spotify-music-and-podcasts/id324684580",
"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.spotify.music",
"570060128",
"com.duolingo"
],
"mode": "monitor",
"countries": ["us"]
}

One change, one row — Spotify's App Store listing between two real captures a week apart:

{
"ok": true,
"rowType": "change",
"store": "apple",
"appId": "324684580",
"country": "us",
"title": "Spotify: Music and Podcasts",
"family": "version",
"field": "version",
"fields": ["version", "updatedAt"],
"before": "9.1.80",
"after": "9.1.82",
"changes": [
{ "field": "version", "before": "9.1.80", "after": "9.1.82" },
{ "field": "updatedAt", "before": "2026-09-07T12:04:45.000Z", "after": "2026-09-14T08:31:16.000Z" }
],
"diffSummary": "version “9.1.80” → “9.1.82”; updatedAt 2026-09-07 → 2026-09-14",
"releaseNotes": "We’re always making changes and improvements to Spotify. …",
"version": "9.1.82",
"rating": 4.77374,
"price": 0,
"previousSnapshotAt": "2026-09-10T06:00:00.000Z",
"currentSnapshotAt": "2026-10-07T06:00:00.000Z",
"releasesLast90Days": 2,
"storeUrl": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/spotify-music-and-podcasts/id324684580"
}

The same comparison on Google Play reported the new update date and a real in-app price change — "inAppPriceRange" from "$6.99 - $203.88 per item" to "$4.99 - $203.88 per item". Every row carries the same 69 columns, so a CSV export has one header whatever a run produced.

Output — in monitor mode, one change row per family that changed, a baseline row the first time a listing is seen, and one free summary row per store per run. In snapshot mode, one app row per listing with everything the store publishes. Anything that could not be read is a free diagnostic row (ok: false, errorType, error), never a charge.

Price — in monitor mode, $0.60 per 1,000 app checks (every listing read, changed or not, the first sighting included) plus $2.00 per 1,000 changes; in snapshot mode, $1.00 per 1,000 full listings and no check fee; $0.001 per run. Six apps watched daily for a month is about $0.15. Apps that could not be read, summaries and diagnostics are free, and a run that could not read a single listing bills nothing. Pay-per-event, limited permissions — works over the Apify MCP server (mcp.apify.com) and with agentic (x402) payments.

From code — client.actor("insight.solutions/app-store-monitor").call(run_input={"apps": ["324684580", "com.spotify.music"], "mode": "monitor"}) with apify-client, or POST https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/insight.solutions~app-store-monitor/run-sync-get-dataset-items.


Try it in 30 seconds

Hit Start with the input already filled in. It reads six listings — Spotify, Duolingo and Notion on both stores — in snapshot mode, so the first run shows you every field straight away and costs about $0.007.

It also stores a baseline for each of them. Switch mode to monitor, keep the same stateStoreName, and put it on a daily schedule: from then on each run returns only what changed. A day on which nothing moved bills six app checks and the start fee — $0.0046.


How the change detection works

Each run reads every listing, compares it with the snapshot the previous run left in a named key-value store, and writes one row per change family that moved:

familyFields comparedApp StoreGoogle Play
versionversion, updatedAt (the store's release date of the current version), releaseNotesall threeupdatedAt and releaseNotes; version when the app publishes one
priceprice, currency, formattedPrice, isFree, inAppPurchases, inAppPriceRangeprice fieldsprice fields, plus the in-app purchase flag and price range
ratingrating, ratingCount, ratingCurrentVersion, ratingCountCurrentVersion — past your thresholdsall fourrating, ratingCount
listingtitle, subtitle (Play's short description), descriptiontitle, descriptionall three
metadatadeveloper, developerId, category, genres, contentRating, minimumOs, sizeBytes, screenshotCount, languages, installsText, containsAdsall but installs and adsall but size, genres and languages

A family with several changed fields is still one row — a new version with new release notes is one version row with both in changes[] — so you pay once per thing that happened, not once per field.

Four rules decide what counts, each one taken from real captures:

Ratings move against a reference, not against yesterday. A rating that slides 0.02 a day never moves 0.1 between two runs, and a monitor comparing run to run would stay silent through a fall from 4.7 to 4.2. Each rating field is compared with the value it had when it was last reported; the reference moves only when a row is written. ratingDeltaThreshold (default 0.1 stars) and ratingCountDeltaPct (default 5%) set the bar, and 0 reports every move.

A field that disappears is not a change. Google Play stopped printing a version string for Spotify between two captures ("Varies with device"). A value that goes from known to unknown is never reported, and the last known value is kept, so when the field comes back it is compared with what it was.

Lists are sets. The two real Spotify App Store captures list the same content advisories in a different order. genres and languages are compared by membership, never by position.

A description edit is a summary, not the text twice. Descriptions are compared line by line after normalising whitespace and blank lines (a re-save with different line endings is not an edit). The row carries lines added and removed, character counts either side and the first 200 characters of what changed — before is the removed text, after the added text — not two copies of a 4,000-character description.

watch gates what is built. A family you did not tick is never built, never counted and never billed as a change (the listing's app check is billed either way: it pays for the read). The snapshot still moves past it, so ticking it later reports what happens next rather than everything since.


Snapshot mode and monitor mode

  • snapshot fetches every listing and returns it whole: one paid app row per app per country. It also stores a baseline for any listing that has none yet, so a later monitor run has something to compare against. It never moves an existing baseline — a snapshot taken between two monitor runs must not swallow the change the next monitor run would have reported.
  • monitor reads every listing — one app-check each, changed or not — and returns one paid change row per changed family on top. The first time a listing is seen it writes a baseline row (title, developer, version, rating, price and the store link) and stores the snapshot; that read is billed as its check. A listing that did not change returns no row of its own (the per-store summary row counts it) — or, with emitUnchanged, a paid app row with the full listing.

Where the state lives

The memory is a named key-value store (stateStoreName, default app-store-monitor-state): an Actor's default store is recreated for every run, including every run of a schedule, so only a named one can carry yesterday's listing.

  • Limited permissions. The Actor creates the store on its first run and re-opens its own store afterwards, which limited-permission Actors are allowed to do. Do not point stateStoreName at a store you made by hand; the Actor cannot read it.
  • One record per app per country: the compared fields (descriptions and release notes included, so the next run can diff them), the rating references, and up to 90 days of daily readings. Measured on Spotify: about 5 KB on the first day, about 11 KB with a full 90 days of history.
  • A run lock, with an expiry derived from your own maxRunSecs. Two runs sharing a store would each compare against the same snapshots and double-report every change, so the second one stops with a free state-locked row. Give concurrent schedules different store names.
  • 90 days' retention. A listing you stop watching falls out of the store by itself.

The outage guard

If every listing of one store fails in the same run — every Play page blocked, every App Store ID "not found" — that is a store-side or proxy fault far more often than news. The run writes one free outage-guard row for that store, compares nothing from it, leaves every snapshot exactly as it was and charges nothing. The next run compares them as normal. A failed listing is never reported as a change in any case: it is a free diagnostic row, and its snapshot is untouched.


Use cases

  • Competitor release tracking. Know the day a competitor ships, with their release notes, and how often they ship (releasesLast30Days, releasesLast90Days).
  • ASO watch. Title, subtitle and description edits as a line summary — see which keywords a competitor just added to their description.
  • Pricing intelligence. Upfront price changes, a free app going paid, in-app purchases appearing, and Play's in-app price range moving.
  • Reputation tracking. Rating moves past a threshold you choose, per country, with the rating-count trend (ratingCountDelta30d).
  • Portfolio hygiene. Watch your own apps: a developer name, category, content rating or minimum-OS change you did not expect, in every storefront you sell in.

Input reference

KeyTypeDefaultWhat it does
appsstring[]—App Store URLs (with or without the app name), numeric App Store IDs, Google Play URLs, Android package names. App Store bundle IDs as ios:com.example.app. Duplicates are read and billed once.
modeenummonitormonitor (only what changed) or snapshot (every listing, whole). The Store form prefills snapshot.
countriesstring[]["us"]Two-letter storefront codes. Each app is read in each country, with its own history. Up to 50.
languagestringenGoogle Play's page language (hl). App Store listings come in the storefront's own language.
watchstring[]all fiveversion, price, rating, listing, metadata. Applied before anything is billed.
ratingDeltaThresholdnumber0.1Stars a rating must move from its last reported value.
ratingCountDeltaPctnumber5Percent a rating count must move from its last reported value.
emitUnchangedbooleanfalseMonitor mode: also return a paid app row for each compared listing with no change.
includeDescriptionbooleantrueFull description on app rows. descriptionLength is always there.
includeReleaseNotesbooleantrueRelease notes on app rows and, in full, on version change rows.
includeScreenshotsbooleanfalseScreenshot URLs on app rows. screenshotCount is always there.
webhookUrlstring (secret)—Monitor mode: POST a JSON digest of the change rows when a run finds at least one. 10 s timeout, one retry, 64 KB cap, same-host redirects only. Only its host is ever logged.
stateStoreNamestringapp-store-monitor-stateThe named key-value store holding the snapshots. One per watchlist.
maxAppsinteger500Apps past this are not read and not charged; one free row lists them.
maxConcurrencyinteger4Requests in flight. Each worker keeps its own proxy session and spaces its requests 300–600 ms apart.
maxRunSecsinteger240Wall-clock budget. Listings not reached get a free timeout row and keep their snapshots.
proxyConfigurationobject{ "useApifyProxy": true }Apify datacenter proxy by default.

Output reference

rowType is app, change, baseline, summary or diagnostic. Every row carries every column; a column that does not apply is null.

Identity — ok, rowType, mode, input, store (apple or google), appId (App Store ID or package name), bundleId, country, language, source, sourceUrl.

The listing (in full on app rows) — title, subtitle, developer, developerId, developerUrl, category, genres, price, currency, formattedPrice, isFree, inAppPurchases, inAppPriceRange, containsAds, rating, ratingCount, ratingCurrentVersion, ratingCountCurrentVersion, version, releasedAt, updatedAt, releaseNotes, description, descriptionLength, minimumOs, sizeBytes, installsText, contentRating, languages, screenshotCount, screenshotUrls, iconUrl, storeUrl, snapshotHash (a fingerprint of everything compared except the rating block).

What each store publishes. The App Store's public lookup has no subtitle, no in-app purchase flag and no ads flag, so those are null on every App Store row. Google Play publishes no file size, no language list and no per-version rating, and for many apps no version string. null means "the store does not say", never zero or false.

The change (on change rows) — family, field (the first field that changed), fields (all of them), before, after (that first field's values), changes ({field, before, after} for each), diffSummary (one human line per field, with deltas and percentages), plus title, developer, version, updatedAt, rating, price, currency and storeUrl as they are now.

History (on app, change and baseline rows) — firstSeenAt, previousSnapshotAt (the age of the comparison), currentSnapshotAt, historyDays, releasesLast30Days, releasesLast90Days (distinct store release dates among this monitor's readings, the current version included), ratingCountDelta30d. These describe what this monitor has seen, which is why historyDays is there: a short watch is distinguishable from a quiet app.

On summary rows — per store: appsRequested, appsChecked (in monitor mode, the number of app checks billed for that store), appsChanged, appsUnchanged, appsBaselined, appsFailed, changeCount.

On diagnostic rows — error in plain language, and errorType: not-found, blocked, timeout, unavailable, upstream-format, invalid-input, outage-guard, charge-limit, state-locked, state-read-failed, state-write-failed, webhook-failed or run-failed. None of them is ever charged for.

Five dataset views are set up for you: Changes, Listings, Releases, Run summaries and Problems.


Pricing

Pay per event:

EventFREEBRONZESILVERGOLD
Run started (actor-start)$0.001$0.001$0.001$0.001
Change (change)$0.002$0.002$0.0016$0.0012
App checked (app-check) — monitor mode$0.0006$0.0006$0.00048$0.00036
App snapshot (app)$0.001$0.001$0.0008$0.0006

$2.00 per 1,000 changes, on top of $0.60 per 1,000 app checks. A monitor has to read every listing on every run to find the few that changed, and the check fee pays for that read — so a quiet watchlist costs a little, not nothing. Snapshot mode bills the full listing row instead and never a check. The start fee is billed once per run, together with the first event it bills.

Run (FREE tier)Bills
The prefill: snapshot of 6 listings$0.007
First monitor run, 6 apps (6 baselines = 6 checks)$0.0046
Daily monitor run, 6 apps, nothing moved (6 checks)$0.0046
Daily monitor run, 6 apps, one competitor shipped (6 checks + version and size rows)$0.0086
6 apps daily for a month, a handful of changes (≈ 180 checks + 6 changes)≈ $0.15
50 apps × 2 countries daily for a month, ~8 changes a day≈ $2.31
A run whose every app was not found or blocked$0

What you are never charged for

SituationBilled?
A listing seen for the first time (baseline row)Its app check only — the row adds nothing
A listing that did not changeIts app check only — plus an app row if you turn on emitUnchanged
A snapshot-mode runNever an app check — one app row per listing
An app that is not found, blocked, timed out or unreadableNo
A store held back by the outage guardNo
A listing the run never reached — maxRunSecs or your cost limitNo, and its snapshot is untouched
summary rows and every diagnostic rowNo
A webhook that could not be deliveredNo — a free webhook-failed row
A run that could not read a single listingNothing at all, start fee included. Like every run with usable input — a quiet one says "0 changes across 6 apps · 6 checked" — it finishes SUCCEEDED. It finishes FAILED only when there was nothing usable to attempt (no entry is an app), the state store is locked by another run, or the Actor itself hit an error
A change already deliveredNo — the snapshot moves past exactly what was delivered

Limits, and the ones that might bite

  • The App Store lookup is not the App Store page. It has no subtitle, no in-app purchase list and no "Contains ads" badge. Those columns are null on App Store rows rather than guessed.
  • Google Play often has no version string. For apps that ship different builds per device, Play shows "Varies with device". On those, a new release shows up as a new updatedAt (and usually new release notes) — still a version row.
  • containsAds and inAppPurchases on Play come from the badges Play prints. No badge means false. If Play rearranges its page, those are among the first fields that could read wrong — see the last point.
  • Size moves with nearly every App Store release. A new version usually means a version row and a metadata row for sizeBytes. Untick metadata if you only care about releases.
  • A bare reverse-DNS string is read as an Android package. com.spotify.client (iPhone) and com.spotify.music (Android) look alike; write an App Store bundle ID as ios:com.spotify.client.
  • The storefront in a URL is ignored. countries decides where each app is read, so the same app pasted from two countries is one entry.
  • A rating that swings back and forth by more than your threshold is reported each time it does. Each report moves the reference, so a rating going 4.5 → 4.6 → 4.5 with a 0.1 threshold is two rows. Raise ratingDeltaThreshold if your watchlist is noisy.
  • The upstream format may change. Apple's lookup is a long-standing public JSON endpoint; Google Play is an HTML page whose data blocks are read by position, and Google owes nobody a stable layout. The parsers are written against real captures and pinned by tests, but a change upstream can turn readings into upstream-format diagnostic rows. Those are free and say what happened.

Use it from an AI agent, or from code

One JSON object in, one flat array out. The Actor runs with limited permissions, uses pay-per-event pricing and never enters Standby, so it works over the Apify MCP server and with x402 agentic payments. The Integrations tab pushes results to Slack, a webhook, Zapier, Make, Google Sheets or BigQuery — or set webhookUrl for a single digest per run.

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/insight.solutions~app-store-monitor/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=$APIFY_TOKEN" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"apps":["324684580","com.spotify.music"],"mode":"snapshot","countries":["us","gb"]}'
# pip install apify-client
from apify_client import ApifyClient
client = ApifyClient("<APIFY_TOKEN>")
run = client.actor("insight.solutions/app-store-monitor").call(run_input={
"apps": ["324684580", "com.spotify.music", "570060128", "com.duolingo"],
"mode": "monitor",
"watch": ["version", "price", "rating", "listing"],
"stateStoreName": "my-competitor-apps",
})
for row in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
if row["rowType"] == "change":
print(row["store"], row["title"], row["family"], row["diffSummary"], sep=" | ")

Keep one stateStoreName per watchlist and put the task on a daily schedule. The first run records baselines; every run after it returns only what moved.


FAQ

Do I need an API key or a developer account? No. Apple's public lookup (itunes.apple.com/lookup) and Google Play's public app pages are what any browser reads. No login, no cookies, no account.

Why did my first monitor run return no change rows? There was nothing to compare against yet. Each listing got a baseline row and was billed as one app check — reading it the first time is the same work as every later check — so six apps cost $0.0046. The next run reports changes. If you want the full listings now, run once in snapshot mode instead.

Why does a monitor run that found nothing cost anything? Because finding nothing still means reading every listing — one App Store record or one 1.2 MB Play page per app per country. That read is the app-check fee, $0.0006 per listing; the change fee is only for what moved. Six apps checked daily for a month is 180 checks ($0.108) plus 30 start fees ($0.03).

Why is subtitle null on App Store rows? Apple's public lookup does not include the subtitle. Rather than guess, the column is null. On Google Play it holds the short description.

A competitor's rating dropped 0.05 — why no row? The default threshold is 0.1 stars. The drop is remembered against the last reported value, so when it reaches 0.1 in total you get one row with the full move. Set ratingDeltaThreshold to 0 to see every move.

Can I watch the same app in several countries? Yes. Put the codes in countries; each app-and-country pair is its own listing, with its own history and its own rows.

Will a snapshot run mess up my monitor? No. Snapshot mode only stores a baseline for listings that have none; it never moves one that a monitor run is using.

Is the webhook URL safe to paste? It is stored as a secret input, sent only to the host you gave, never followed to another host, and only its host ever appears in a log line or a row.


  • Public store data only. Listing fields Apple and Google publish to any visitor: names, versions, prices, ratings as aggregates, descriptions, categories.
  • No reviewer data of any kind. No reviews, no review text, no reviewer names, no review IDs. Ratings are the store's own averages and counts.
  • The developer is the publisher of record, exactly as the store prints it on every listing — a company or an independent publisher name. Contact details Play shows for the developer (support email, address) are not collected.
  • No cookies that identify anyone, no login, no account. Requests are paced — 300–600 ms between requests of one worker — and a refused request is retried once from a fresh exit and then left alone.
  • You are responsible for how you use the data, including any contractual or competition-law limits that apply to you.

Our other Actors

Every Insight Solutions Actor is pay-per-result with no browser, no login and no API key, and every one of them returns free diagnostic rows instead of billing for failures. Prices are per 1,000 results.

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