App Store Review Watch

Watch Apple App Store apps by numeric ID or apps.apple.com URL and return only NEW customer reviews since the last run.

This Actor talks to Apple's public JSON APIs — the iTunes Customer Reviews RSS feed and the iTunes Lookup API. Anyone can retrieve the RSS (Apple staff confirmation). No HTML scraping. No App Store Connect. Not Google Play.

What this Actor does

• Accepts App Store IDs (389801252) or App Store URLs (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/instagram/id389801252).
• Sweeps one or more storefronts (country codes such as us, gb, de).
• Fetches the most-recent reviews from
  https://itunes.apple.com/{country}/rss/customerreviews/page={1-10}/id={appId}/sortby=mostrecent/json
• Enriches each app with title + bundle ID from
  https://itunes.apple.com/lookup?id={appId}&country={country} (no API key).
• Dedupes by Apple review id, persisted across scheduled reruns, so you only pay for new rows.
• Emits a run-summary record with appsChecked, newCount, and rssCapHit.

Official RSS limit (~500 / storefront)

Apple's customerreviews RSS is a rolling window, not a full history:

Page size	~50 reviews
Max pages	10
Max per app × storefront	~500 most-recent reviews

If an app is very chatty and you don't run often enough, older reviews fall off the window. The rssCapHit flag on the run-summary is true when page 10 was still full — increase schedule frequency or add storefronts rather than expecting the RSS to go deeper. This Actor will not scrape the App Store website to go past that cap.

Not Google Play

This Actor only reads the Apple App Store. It will not accept Play Store URLs, does not call Google APIs, and does not scrape play.google.com. For Android reviews you need a different Actor.

Input

Field	Required	Default	Description
apps	yes	—	Array of numeric App Store IDs or apps.apple.com / itunes.apple.com URLs
countries	no	["us"]	ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 storefront codes to sweep
since	no	last run / seen IDs	ISO date. If omitted, seen review IDs from previous runs are used
maxPages	no	10	1–10 RSS pages per app × storefront
debug	no	false	Log RSS URLs, page sizes, and review IDs (not bodies)

Input example

{
  "apps": [
    "389801252",
    "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/x/id333903271"
  ],
  "countries": ["us", "gb", "de"],
  "maxPages": 10,
  "debug": false
}

Country sweep

Each app × storefront is one successful RSS fetch (app-checked event), even when zero reviews are new. Typical sweeps:

• Launch markets: ["us"]
• English-speaking: ["us", "gb", "au", "ca"]
• EU sample: ["us", "gb", "de", "fr", "it", "es", "nl"]

Reviews are storefront-specific. The same customer does not appear once globally — a US 5-star and a DE 5-star are different rows.

Output

Every new review is one dataset row:

Field	Meaning
appId	Numeric Apple track ID
appTitle	Localized name from Lookup
bundleId	e.g. com.burbn.instagram
country	Storefront code
reviewId	Apple review id (dedupe key)
rating	1–5
title	Review title
body	Review text
author	Reviewer display name
version	App version the reviewer was on
date	RSS updated timestamp
url	App Store reviews page for that storefront

Plus one run-summary record: appsChecked, newCount, rssCapHit.

recordType is "review" or "run-summary" so you can filter.

How "new" is decided

1. Apple review id is the source of truth. IDs are stored in a named key-value store (app-store-review-watch-state) so scheduled reruns skip rows you already received.
2. Optional since additionally drops reviews older than that instant.
3. If since is omitted, the first run emits the current RSS window (up to ~500/storefront) and remembers those IDs. Later runs emit only unseen IDs.

The run's default key-value store is unique per run and would forget state; a named store is required for a watch Actor.

Scheduling (daily)

Create a schedule in Apify Console, e.g. daily at 08:00 UTC:

0 8 * * *

For busy apps, run every 6 hours (0 */6 * * *) so you stay inside the 500-review window. First run is a backfill of the current window; after that you only see deltas.

Pricing (pay-per-event only)

Events-only PPE. Do not enable "PPE + usage". Platform synthetic apify-actor-start is kept; remove apify-default-dataset-item so dataset writes are not double-billed. apify-actor-start is charged by Apify automatically — the Actor does not call Actor.charge for it.

Event	When	Default	Bronze	Silver	Gold
apify-actor-start	Every run (synthetic, covers first 5s of compute)	$0.00005	$0.00005	$0.00005	$0.00005
app-checked	After a successful RSS fetch for one app × one storefront, even if 0 new reviews	$0.02	$0.018	$0.016	$0.014
new-review	After each new review is pushData'd (deduped by Apple review id)	$0.002	$0.002	$0.002	$0.002

Example costs

• 1 app, 1 storefront, 0 new reviews: ~$0.02005 (start + one check)
• 1 app, 1 storefront, 10 new reviews: ~$0.04005
• 5 apps × 3 countries, daily, quiet day: 15 × $0.02 = $0.30/day in app-checked, plus $0.002 per new review

Memory is capped at 256–1024 MB (minMemoryMbytes / maxMemoryMbytes) so a user cannot run this JSON-only Actor at 32 GB.

MCP / agents

Limited-permission PPE Actors can be called from agents (and later x402). Point a client at Apify's hosted MCP server and pin this Actor once it is published:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "apify": {
      "url": "https://mcp.apify.com?tools=actors,<username>/app-store-review-watch"
    }
  }
}

Replace <username> with the Apify account that published the Actor. The server lives at mcp.apify.com. call-actor uses this Actor's input schema; full-permission and rental Actors are excluded from MCP, which is why this project is limited permissions + PPE events only.

Cursor / VS Code can also use the same URL. See Apify MCP docs.

Legal / source

• Reviews RSS is a public iTunes feed. Apple Developer Forums thread 16909: staff stated anyone can retrieve it.
• Lookup is the public iTunes Search API (no key).
• This Actor does not log into Apple IDs, does not use App Store Connect, and does not scrape HTML.

FAQ

Why did I get 0 reviews on run 2? All current RSS ids were already stored. That is success — you still pay app-checked.

Can I get more than 500 reviews? Not from this Actor. That is Apple's RSS window. Run more often or add storefronts.

Does since replace seen IDs? No. Both apply. since filters by date; seen IDs prevent duplicates across runs.

Play Store? No. Apple App Store only.