App Review Monitor — iOS Alerts, Ratings & Signals

Watch the App Store reviews of your apps — and your competitors' — and get alerted when something new happens.

Most review scrapers dump raw reviews and leave the rest to you. This Actor is a monitor: schedule it daily, and with diff mode it returns only the reviews that weren't there yesterday — ready to pipe into Slack, email or a webhook. Filter to 1-2 stars and you have an early-warning system for angry users; point it at competitor apps and you get their complaints as your roadmap.

It reads Apple's official public feeds only (the customer-reviews RSS and the iTunes lookup API). No login, no proxies, no anti-bot games — fast, cheap, reliable.

What can it do?

• Diff mode (newReviewsOnly): only reviews not seen in previous runs — the foundation for scheduled alerts. Every review also carries an isNew flag.
• Negative-review alarm: set maxRating: 2 and get pinged only when a 1-2 star review lands.
• Multi-country: check each app across any list of storefronts (us, gb, es, de, jp...).
• Review signals per app & country: average rating of the recent window, rating distribution, negative share, newest review date — plus the app's overall store rating, total ratings, current version and developer from Apple's lookup API.
• Unified, clean output: rating as a number, ISO dates, app name resolved automatically. Export JSON, CSV or Excel; MCP-ready for AI agents.

Use cases

Who	What
Product managers	Know within hours when users start complaining about a release — negative-review alerts by version.
Mobile studios & agencies	One scheduled run covering every client app, with per-app signals for reporting.
Competitor research	Competitors' 1-star reviews = your feature roadmap and your ad copy.
ASO / marketing	Track rating trends across countries after campaigns or launches.

Input

{
    "apps": [
        "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/youtube/id544007664",
        "310633997"
    ],
    "countries": ["us", "gb", "es"],
    "maxRating": 2,
    "newReviewsOnly": true
}

Parameter	Type	Description
apps	Array (required)	App Store URLs or numeric app IDs.
countries	Array	Storefront country codes (default ["us"]). Each app is checked in every country.
maxReviewsPerApp	Integer	Recent-review window per app & country (default 100, max ~500 — Apple's feed limit).
minRating / maxRating	Integer	Rating window filter (1-5). maxRating: 2 = negative reviews only.
newReviewsOnly	Boolean	Diff mode. Only reviews not seen in previous runs. First run primes the memory.
trackNewReviews	Boolean	Adds isNew to every review (default true).
computeSignals	Boolean	One review_signals summary item per app & country (default true).
includeAppMeta	Boolean	Enrich signals with overall rating, total ratings, version, developer (default true).

Output

One item per review:

{
    "type": "review",
    "appId": "544007664",
    "appName": "YouTube",
    "country": "us",
    "reviewId": "14269247779",
    "rating": 2,
    "title": "Too many ads",
    "text": "The app is fine but the ads are out of control lately.",
    "author": "Some User",
    "appVersion": "21.26.4",
    "updatedAt": "2026-07-06T02:09:33-07:00",
    "isNew": true
}

Plus one review_signals item per app & country (optional):

{
    "type": "review_signals",
    "appName": "YouTube",
    "country": "us",
    "windowSize": 100,
    "windowAvgRating": 3.9,
    "ratingDistribution": { "1": 12, "2": 8, "3": 10, "4": 20, "5": 50 },
    "negativeShare": 0.2,
    "newReviewsSinceLastRun": 7,
    "overallRating": 4.67,
    "totalRatings": 47472624,
    "currentVersion": "21.22.04"
}

Quick-start recipes

Daily negative-review alert for your app (schedule daily + Slack integration):

{ "apps": ["YOUR_APP_ID"], "countries": ["us", "gb"], "maxRating": 2, "newReviewsOnly": true }

Competitor complaint mining:

{ "apps": ["COMPETITOR_1_ID", "COMPETITOR_2_ID"], "maxRating": 3, "maxReviewsPerApp": 300 }

Multi-country rating dashboard (signals only):

{ "apps": ["YOUR_APP_ID"], "countries": ["us", "gb", "de", "es", "fr", "jp"], "maxReviewsPerApp": 100 }

FAQ

Is this allowed? Yes — the Actor only reads Apple's official, public customer-reviews feeds and lookup API, which exist precisely so this data can be consumed programmatically. No authentication is bypassed.

How far back can it go? Apple's feed exposes roughly the ~500 most recent reviews per storefront. That's why the monitor pattern works so well: run it on a schedule and you never miss one, building your own complete history in the dataset.

Android / Google Play? Google doesn't offer an equivalent official public feed, and we only ship sources that don't violate terms of service. If that changes, it'll be added.

How does diff mode behave on the first run? It returns everything and primes the per-app memory; from the second run on, only new reviews.

Changelog

1.0

• Initial release: official Apple feeds, multi-country, rating filters, diff mode with isNew, per-app signals with store metadata.