RuStore App Scraper & Monitor

Scrape apps from RuStore — Russia's Android app store (VK), preinstalled on every phone sold in the country — and track what changes between runs.

Ratings, review counts, downloads, versions, sizes, prices, developers. ~69,500 apps.

What you get

One row per app:

Field	Meaning
packageName, name, url, description	App identity
rating, ratingCount	Star rating and how many ratings it has
downloads	RuStore's own downloads bucket ("40 млн +") — a rounded band, never an exact number
version, fileSizeBytes, updatedAt	Current version, APK size, when it was last updated
price, priceCurrency, isFree	Price in ₽
developer, developerId, developerUrl	Publisher and their RuStore profile
category, contentRating	e.g. SocialNetworkingApplication, 12+
sourceCategory	The RuStore category the app was discovered in (when using Categories) — e.g. finance, games/free
verified	RuStore's data-safety moderation badge
icon, screenshots[]	Media
reviews[]	Optional — the handful of reviews RuStore embeds in the app card (author, rating, date, text)

In Monitor mode every row also gets changeType — new / rating_up / rating_down / reviews_change / version_change / price_up / price_down / delisted / relisted / unchanged — plus previousRating, previousRatingCount, previousVersion, previousPrice, firstSeenAt, lastConfirmedAt and a 30-day rating band.

Delisted apps are reported, not dropped. If an app is pulled from RuStore (its page starts returning 404) you still get a row — delisted: true, changeType: "delisted" — carrying its last known name and rating. An app leaving the store is a signal, not missing data. It is reported once, then stays unchanged until it returns (relisted).

Reviews mode

Turn on Reviews mode and the output becomes one row per review — appName, packageName, author, rating, datePublished, text, plus the app's appRating / totalReviews for context.

The honest limit: RuStore renders exactly the 30 most recent reviews per app and offers no way to get more — no pagination, no "show more", and scrolling loads nothing. So:

App	What 30 reviews covers
Yandex Cloud (19 reviews total)	its complete history — 2023 → 2026
Толока (57 total)	the last 1.5 years
2ГИС (7,571 total)	the last 4 days
ВКонтакте (34,800 total)	the last ~15 minutes

For most of the catalogue's long tail, 30 is everything there is. For busy apps it is a rolling window — so run Reviews mode with Monitor mode on a schedule: each run emits only reviews it has not seen before, and the dataset accumulates the review stream. (Verified: a second run 60 seconds later returned exactly 1 row — the single new review that had appeared.)

Use it for

• Review mining — collect reviews per app on a schedule (see Reviews mode).
• ASO / competitor tracking — watch a rival's rating, review count and release cadence (updatedAt + version_change).
• Market research — pull a whole RuStore category (finance, games…) and compare ratings, prices and publishers side by side.
• Release monitoring — get notified when an app ships a new version, changes price, or disappears.

Input

Option	Description
Apps	Package names (com.vkontakte.android) or full RuStore URLs — both accepted.
Categories	Scrape whole RuStore categories — finance, games, health… Accepts a slug, a slug with a price filter (finance/free, tools/paid — every category except games and tv), or a full category URL including topic pages like /catalog/all/tag-anime-5. Every row is tagged with sourceCategory.
Crawl the catalogue	Pull apps from RuStore's own sitemap (~69,500 apps).
Catalogue filter	Only apps whose package contains this text — yandex, sberbank, com.vk.
Max apps from catalogue / Max apps	Keep a run bounded.
Include reviews	Add the handful of reviews embedded in each app card (app mode).
Reviews mode	Output one row per review instead of per app — 30 most recent per app. With Monitor mode, only reviews not seen before.
Monitor mode / Only output changes	Compare against the previous run; optionally emit only what moved.
Max concurrency	Parallel page fetches (default 10).
Proxy	Apify datacenter proxy (the default) — cheap, no residential needed.

Example

{
  "crawlSitemap": true,
  "appFilter": "yandex",
  "maxAppsFromSitemap": 100,
  "monitorMode": true,
  "onlyChanges": true
}

Schedule that and each run's dataset is a clean list of every Yandex app whose rating, version or price moved.

Notes & limits

• A proxy is required. RuStore's antibot (kittenx) challenges some networks — a plain unproxied request can get bounced to a challenge page. The Apify datacenter proxy sails through and is the cheapest option; it is the default.
• downloads is a bucket, not a count. RuStore only ever publishes rounded bands ("40 млн +"). It is reported verbatim rather than turned into a fake precise number.
• Unrated apps return rating: null — that is real (nobody has rated them), not a scrape failure.
• Reviews are capped at the 30 most recent per app — that is RuStore's limit, not the Actor's. There is no pagination to work around it. Apps with ≤30 reviews yield their full history.
• RuStore's antibot throttles in waves. When it does, some app pages cannot be fetched even after 9 retries. The run never hides this: it warns with the exact count and percentage, names the affected packages, and stores the full list in the run's key-value store under FAILED_APPS — so you can re-run just those later.
• If you see losses, LOWER "Max concurrency", don't raise it. Measured: concurrency 30 was only ~13% faster than 15 but lost 33 apps instead of 1. The default of 10 is the sweet spot; heavy parallelism makes the antibot throttle harder.
• Runs stop cleanly before the platform timeout and honour the run's maximum-cost limit, committing what they have.