Personal Game Chart Monitor

Track Google Play and Apple App Store game rankings by country and discover apps that newly appear in a top chart. Personal Game Chart Monitor saves your first top-100 result as a private baseline, then compares each later run with the previous successful observation and returns only newly observed chart entries.

Use it as a lightweight Google Play ranking tracker, App Store chart monitor, game-discovery feed, or scheduled data source for your own integrations. No historical database is shared between users: each user builds a baseline from the charts they choose to monitor.

What this Actor does

1. Downloads up to 100 apps from the selected store, country, category, and chart.
2. Validates the result before replacing the saved baseline.
3. On the first successful run, saves the baseline and returns zero new entries.
4. On later runs, returns apps whose app IDs were not present in the previous successful snapshot.
5. Saves the current validated snapshot for the next comparison.

An app that leaves the top 100 and later returns can therefore be reported as a new chart entry again. This Actor detects changes between observations; it does not claim to know an app's first-ever appearance in store history.

Supported chart options

Input	Supported values
store	google-play, app-store
country	Two-letter uppercase country code, such as US, JP, or GB
category	GAME by default; the App Store currently supports GAME only
chart	top-free, top-paid, top-grossing

Google Play results are localized using the selected country. App Store results use Apple's country-specific game-chart feed. Availability and ordering are determined by the stores at the time of each run.

Quick start

Run the Actor once with your desired scope:

{
  "store": "google-play",
  "country": "US",
  "category": "GAME",
  "chart": "top-free"
}

The first run intentionally returns isBaseline: true and newEntryCount: 0. Run it again later with the same input, or save it as an Apify task and schedule it daily. Use a different input scope to maintain an independent baseline for another country, store, category, or chart.

Output

Each run writes one summary object to the default Dataset and to the OUTPUT record in the default Key-Value Store:

{
  "status": "ok",
  "scope": {
    "store": "google-play",
    "country": "US",
    "category": "GAME",
    "chart": "top-free"
  },
  "observedAt": "2026-08-26T13:38:23.764Z",
  "appCount": 100,
  "isBaseline": false,
  "newEntryCount": 1,
  "entries": [
    {
      "appId": "com.example.game",
      "rank": 42,
      "title": "Example Game",
      "developer": "Example Studio",
      "url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.example.game",
      "event": "new_chart_entry",
      "firstObservedAt": "2026-08-26T13:38:23.764Z"
    }
  ]
}

firstObservedAt is when this monitor first observed the app as absent from the previous snapshot and present in the current one. It is not the app's release date and is not proof of its first-ever chart appearance. When store release-date data is available, an entry can also include releaseDate and daysSinceRelease.

Schedule recurring checks

For continuous monitoring, save your configured input as an Apify task and attach a daily schedule. Keep the same scope on every run so the Actor compares the intended chart. The result can then be consumed from the Dataset, Key-Value Store, Apify API, webhook, or another integration.

For API use, run nullwave/personal-game-chart-monitor with the same JSON input through the Apify Actor API. Your first API run creates the baseline just like a Console run.

Important limitations

• The Actor compares the current top 100 with the previous successful top-100 snapshot; it does not reconstruct earlier history.
• A first run cannot identify prior entries, so returning zero new entries is deliberate.
• Store charts can change between requests and may differ by country.
• Invalid or unexpectedly small snapshots are rejected instead of overwriting a valid baseline.
• Changing any scope field starts or resumes a separate baseline for that scope.

FAQ

Why is my first result empty?

There is no earlier observation to compare with. The first run saves a baseline and still writes a non-empty summary row to the Dataset. Later runs can then identify newly present app IDs.

Does this return newly released games?

Not necessarily. It returns games newly observed in the selected chart since the previous successful run. A game can be old and still enter or re-enter a chart.

Can I monitor multiple countries?

Yes. Run or schedule the Actor separately for each country and chart combination. Each scope keeps an independent baseline.