# Changelog of Google Play Reviews Scraper — Android App Reviews & Ratings (`kestrel/google-play-reviews-scraper`) Actor

- **URL**: https://apify.com/kestrel/google-play-reviews-scraper/changelog.md
- **Full Actor documentation**: https://apify.com/kestrel/google-play-reviews-scraper.md

## Changelog

### 2026-08-30

- Reliability: a run that cannot act on its input — a URL from the wrong site, a name nothing resolves to, an empty target list, a number outside the documented range — now ends cleanly with the reason on the run card instead of as a failed run. Nothing is charged in either case; a blocked or throttled source still fails loudly.
- Store listing: moved into the categories buyers actually browse (the old `Business` category has no Store page).

### 1.0 — 2026-08-29

First release.

- Every review of any Android app, read from the same review call the Google Play web page makes: 1-5 rating, review text, reviewer name, thumbs-up count, app version, date and the developer's public reply. Pages by continuation token to the end of the list — hundreds of thousands of reviews for the big apps.
- **Every language and country in one run**: give `languages` (en, de, pt-BR, ja…) and `countries` (us, gb, in, br…) and each app is read for each pair; every row carries `language` and `country`. A review Google lists under two locales is delivered and billed once.
- Two ways in: package names, or Google Play URLs (the package name is read from the URL).
- Three orders: most recent (the one to schedule), most relevant (Google Play's own default), highest rating first.
- Cost controls that filter **before** billing: `minRating` / `maxRating` (a complaints feed pays only for the 1-2★ rows; a single star value is filtered by Google itself, so the rest are never fetched), `sinceDate` (absolute or relative — "7 days" — so schedules never go stale) and `requireText`. Filtered reviews are never charged.
- A free `app` row per app and locale: name, developer, category, content rating, average rating, rating count, price, currency, icon and description.
- Billing: pay per delivered review row. App rows, status rows, filtered reviews, apps with no reviews, unknown packages and failed jobs are all free.
- Reliability: Google throttles bursts per IP; the fetcher paces per session, treats an answer without a review payload as a refusal (never as "no reviews"), rotates and backs off, so large runs finish instead of failing.