# App Store Reviews Scraper & Release Health (`steadywren/apple-app-store-reviews-scraper`) Actor App Store reviews scraper: iOS app reviews in any country (rating, text, app version) at $0.10 per 1,000, plus an optional app report ($0.002 each): rating by version with bad-release alerts, what competitors shipped, complaint topics, subscription prices by country, chart ranks. - **URL**: https://apify.com/steadywren/apple-app-store-reviews-scraper.md - **Developed by:** [Steadywren](https://apify.com/steadywren) (community) - **Categories:** Developer tools, SEO tools, Automation - **Stats:** 2 total users, 1 monthly users, 100.0% runs succeeded, 0 bookmarks - **User rating**: No ratings yet ## Pricing from $0.10 / 1,000 reviews This Actor is paid per event. You are not charged for the Apify platform usage, but only a fixed price for specific events. Learn more: https://docs.apify.com/actors/running/actors-in-store.md#pay-per-event ## What's an Apify Actor? An Actor is a serverless cloud program that runs on the Apify platform. It has two run modes. In Batch mode, an Actor accepts a well-defined JSON input, performs an action which can take anything from a few seconds to a few hours, and optionally produces a well-defined JSON output, datasets with results, or files in key-value store. In Standby mode, an Actor provides a web server which can be used as a website, API, or an MCP server. Apify vocabulary and the platform model are defined once, in the agent quickstart at https://apify.com/agents.md. ## How to integrate an Actor? If asked about integration, you help developers integrate Actors into their projects. You adapt to their stack and deliver integrations that are safe, well-documented, and production-ready. Do not guess an integration path. Every one of them is in the agent quickstart at https://apify.com/agents.md: the Apify MCP server, Agent Skills with the Apify CLI, the JavaScript and Python clients, the REST API, and the account-free path for an agent with no human to sign in. It also carries the rule on stating cost before the first paid run. For examples already wired to this Actor's own input schema, see the [API](#api) section below. Each client library has reference documentation the quickstart does not restate: [JavaScript/TypeScript](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/js/docs.md) (`npm install apify-client`) and [Python](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/python/docs.md) (`pip install apify-client`). # README ## App Store Reviews Scraper & Release Health App Store reviews scraper for your app and your competitors, in any country: export **iOS app reviews** (rating, title, text, app version) **plus an app report** for each app and country - yours and your competitors' - with rating by app version and **bad-release alerts**, **what competitors shipped and how users reacted**, the **complaint topics** behind the stars, **subscription prices by country** in USD, and **chart ranks**. Apple App Store reviews cost **$0.10 per 1,000**, the same as plain review scrapers; each app report costs **$0.002** and can be switched off. ![App Store Reviews Scraper & Release Health - example output](https://steadywren.com/assets/screens/apple-app-store-reviews-scraper.png) ### What you get - **Release health**: average rating and complaint topics for each app version, the change against the previous version, and `badRelease: true` when a release drops the rating by 0.5 stars or more. - **What competitors shipped and how users reacted**: the last 10 versions with release date, release notes, rating and complaint topics, plus release cadence (releases in the last 90 days, days between releases) over the ~25 versions Apple lists. - **Why users are unhappy**: every review is tagged with topics - `crash`, `bugs`, `login`, `billing`, `ads`, `performance`, `ui`, `feature_request` (English, German, French, Spanish, Ukrainian) - and each app gets its top complaints with their share. - **Subscription and in-app prices by country**: the price list Apple shows on the app page, parsed into numbers and converted to USD, so you can compare pricing across countries and competitors. Price changes between runs are listed and raise an alert. - **Chart ranks**: position in the top free, paid and grossing charts (top 100) of the app's category, with changes between runs. - **App reports in their own table**: one report per app and country in the **App reports** table of the Output tab; reviews stay in the main dataset. - **Competitor comparison**: one table per country with all your apps side by side (`COMPARISON` record in the run's Output tab). - **Reviews**: rating, title, text, version, date, helpful votes and topics. Reviewer names are never collected. - **Complete data, or honestly marked gaps**: Apple's review feed often answers pages empty at random, and a simple scraper just returns fewer reviews without telling you. This Actor retries every empty page up to 20 times, tries the remaining ones again in a second pass a minute later, and reports any page that still did not come in `reviewPagesMissing`. With history tracking, the next daily run usually fills those gaps, as long as the missed reviews are still among the newest `maxReviewsPerApp`. - **History and alerts**: daily scheduled runs remember reviews, versions, prices and ranks in your account, so release statistics grow past Apple's 500-review limit and `alerts` tell you about bad releases, price changes and chart drops. Turn on *Only new reviews* to get just what is new since the last run. ### Example: app report ```json { "type": "app", "appId": "281796108", "appName": "Evernote: AI Notes & Notebook", "country": "us", "storeRating": 4.41, "ratingCount": 78032, "ratingHistogram": { "1": 0.091, "2": 0.026, "3": 0.033, "4": 0.087, "5": 0.764 }, "currentVersion": "11.40.3", "releasesLast90Days": 15, "avgDaysBetweenReleases": 6.6, "reviewsAnalyzed": 100, "recentRating": 1.38, "topComplaints": [ { "topic": "billing", "share": 0.37 }, { "topic": "ads", "share": 0.28 }, { "topic": "bugs", "share": 0.1 } ], "versions": [ { "version": "11.40.3", "releasedAt": "2026-10-28T18:58:07.000Z", "notes": "Bug fixes: ... (shortened)", "reviews": 2, "avgRating": 1, "ratingChange": null, "topComplaints": [{ "topic": "billing", "share": 0.5 }] }, { "version": "11.39.3", "releasedAt": "2026-10-23T08:17:37.000Z", "notes": "New features: ... (shortened)", "reviews": 10, "avgRating": 1.5, "ratingChange": 0.36, "topComplaints": [{ "topic": "billing", "share": 0.6 }] } ], "badRelease": false, "inAppPurchases": [ { "name": "Evernote Personal", "priceText": "$17.49", "price": 17.49, "currency": "USD", "priceUsd": 17.49 } ], "priceChanges": [], "chartRanks": { "topFree": null, "topPaid": null, "topGrossing": 36 }, "rankChanges": {}, "alerts": [], "reviewsCapped": false, "reviewPagesMissing": 0 } ``` Reading it: Evernote shows 4.41 stars in the store, but its 100 newest reviews average 1.38, and 37% of them complain about billing and 28% about ads. It ships often (15 releases in 90 days) and sits at #36 in the top-grossing Productivity chart. ### Example: review ```json { "type": "review", "reviewId": "15000000001", "appName": "Notion: Notes, Tasks, AI", "country": "us", "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id1232780281?see-all=reviews", "rating": 2, "title": "Sync keeps failing", "text": "Since the last update my pages don't sync and the app crashes when I open a database.", "version": "1.7.350", "date": "2026-10-29T23:50:04-07:00", "voteSum": 0, "voteCount": 0, "topics": ["crash"], "isNew": true } ``` (Illustrative text; real reviews carry the reviewer's own words.) ### How much does it cost? **$0.10 per 1,000 reviews** (the same as plain review scrapers) and **$2 per 1,000 app reports** ($0.002 each; one report = one app in one country), plus a small Actor start fee charged by Apify. Platform compute is included. Example: your app + 3 competitors in 2 countries with 100 new reviews each costs about $0.10 per run. ### Use cases - **Release monitoring**: schedule daily with your app and *Only new reviews*; act on `alerts` containing `bad_release`. - **Competitor research**: put your competitors next to your app and compare recent rating, complaints, release pace, prices and chart position. - **Pricing**: compare subscription prices of your category across countries in USD and get notified when a competitor changes them. - **Product feedback**: filter reviews by topic (`feature_request`, `crash`, `billing`) and version. ### Input | Field | Type | Default | Description | |---|---|---|---| | `apps` | array | Notion | App Store URLs, app ids or app names (the first search result is used). | | `countries` | array | `["us"]` | Two-letter App Store countries (us, gb, de, fr, ua...). | | `maxReviewsPerApp` | integer | 100 | Newest reviews per app and country, up to 500 (Apple's limit). | | `includeReviews` | boolean | `true` | Output one result per review. | | `includeReport` | boolean | `true` | Output one app report per app and country. | | `includeCharts` | boolean | `true` | Look up the app's category chart ranks. | | `trackHistory` | boolean | `true` | Remember reviews, versions, prices and ranks between runs (key-value store `app-store-review-history` in your account). | | `onlyNew` | boolean | `false` | Output only reviews earlier runs have not returned (turns history on). | | `proxyConfiguration` | object | off | Not needed for the App Store. | ### Monitor daily 1. Console -> **Schedules** -> create a schedule for this Actor (or for a saved task with your apps and countries) and let it run daily. 2. Turn on *Only new reviews* and set `maxReviewsPerApp: 500`: each run outputs only reviews earlier runs did not return (`isNew: true`). 3. With history tracking, the app reports show price and chart-rank changes since the last run and `alerts` such as `bad_release:`, `price_change:` and `rank_drop:`. 4. Actor -> **Integrations**: send every finished run to Slack, email, Google Sheets or your own webhook. ### FAQ **Where are the app reports?** In their own table, so reviews and reports both have clean columns: run page -> Output tab -> **App reports** (or Storage -> Dataset -> `reports`). Reviews stay in the main dataset, which the Export button and the default API endpoint return. Via API: `GET /v2/actor-runs/` -> `storageIds.datasets.reports` gives the dataset id, then `/v2/datasets//items`. **Why at most 500 reviews?** Apple's public review feed serves the newest 500 reviews per app and country. For big apps that is a few days. With history tracking, scheduled runs keep counting new reviews, so version statistics cover far more than 500 over time. **Is the history shared between my runs?** Yes - all runs and tasks of your account use the same key-value store `app-store-review-history`. A manual run on the same app marks its reviews as seen, so a scheduled *Only new reviews* task will not return them again. Turn *Track history* off for one-off runs, or delete the store to start over. **Which settings for daily alerts?** Schedule daily with *Only new reviews* and `maxReviewsPerApp: 500`. With 100, a busy app can get more than 100 new reviews a day and the rest would never be seen. **Why is `priceUsd` empty for some countries?** Prices are converted with the European Central Bank's daily rates, which do not cover every currency (for example the Ukrainian hryvnia). The local price is always there in `price` and `priceText`. **What is `reviewPagesMissing`?** Apple's review feed often answers a page empty at random, sometimes many times in a row. The Actor retries every empty page with a fresh request up to 20 times, then once more in a second pass at least a minute after the failure (Apple's failures come in streaks, so a minute later the page usually comes); apps without gaps are delivered right away. A page that is still empty is counted here (including the first page of an app that has ratings) instead of being silently skipped, so you know when a sample is smaller than asked. With history tracking, a missed page is usually picked up by the next run, as long as those reviews are still among the newest `maxReviewsPerApp`. **Why is `recentRating` so much lower than `storeRating`?** The store rating includes years of in-app rating prompts (mostly 5 stars); written reviews are left mostly by unhappy users. The gap between the two, and its trend per version, is the signal. **How are topics found?** By keywords and phrases in English, German, French, Spanish and Ukrainian. Reviews in other languages get no topics, but still count in ratings by version. Problem topics count only in reviews of 3 stars or less; `feature_request` counts at any rating. **How is `badRelease` decided?** The newest version with at least 10 reviews averages 0.5 stars or more below the previous version with at least 10 reviews. **Where do the USD prices come from?** Prices are parsed from the app page in the country's currency and converted with the European Central Bank's daily rates (see above for currencies without a rate). **Is it legal?** The Actor reads only public App Store pages and Apple's public feeds - no login. Reviewer names are not collected. Check Apple's terms for your use case. **Something broke?** Open an issue on the Actor page - we answer within 12 hours. ### More from Steadywren - [Google Play Reviews Scraper](https://apify.com/steadywren/google-play-reviews-scraper) - the same release health and complaint analytics for Android apps, plus developer reply rate and installs per day. - [Shopify App Store Scraper](https://apify.com/steadywren/shopify-app-store-scraper) - Shopify app reviews with review trends, reply rate, category ranks and change alerts. **Who builds this?** [Steadywren](https://steadywren.com) - small tools, steady results. More products and custom builds on [steadywren.com](https://steadywren.com). ### Changes - **2026-11-02:** app reports moved from the main dataset to their own **App reports** table (run dataset `reports`), so both tables have clean columns. If you read reports through the API, use `storageIds.datasets.reports` of the run (see FAQ). Reviews did not move. ### Technical details - Sources: iTunes Lookup and Search API, Apple's customer-reviews RSS feed (50 reviews per page, 10 pages), the public app page (embedded JSON: star counts, version history, in-app purchases) and the category top-chart feeds. Plain HTTP, no browser, no proxy. - Retries: network errors, 5xx, 403 and 429 are retried with backoff; 404 and other 4xx fail at once; empty review pages are retried with a fresh URL. - Every run stores a `RUN_SUMMARY` record and fails when no app is found or the key report fields (`appName`, `storeRating`, `ratingHistogram`) are empty in most results. # Actor input Schema ## `apps` (type: `array`): App Store URLs, app ids (e.g. 1232780281) or app names to search. Add your competitors to get a side-by-side comparison. ## `countries` (type: `array`): Two-letter App Store country codes (us, gb, de, fr, ua...). Reviews, prices and charts are per country. ## `maxReviewsPerApp` (type: `integer`): Newest reviews to fetch. Apple serves at most 500 per app and country; with history tracking, daily runs build up more over time. ## `includeReviews` (type: `boolean`): One result per review with rating, text, version, date and complaint topics. Turn off to get only the app reports. ## `includeReport` (type: `boolean`): One result per app and country: rating by version with bad-release flag, release notes and cadence, complaint topics, in-app purchase prices (with USD and changes), chart ranks and alerts. ## `includeCharts` (type: `boolean`): Position in the top free, paid and grossing charts (top 100) of the app's category. ## `trackHistory` (type: `boolean`): Remember reviews, versions, prices and ranks in a key-value store "app-store-review-history" in your account, so reports grow past Apple's 500-review cap and show price and rank changes. ## `onlyNew` (type: `boolean`): Output only reviews that earlier runs have not returned (turns history on). Use with a daily schedule for alerts. ## `proxyConfiguration` (type: `object`): Not needed for the App Store; leave off unless Apple starts limiting your requests. ## Actor input object example ```json { "apps": [ "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/notion-notes-tasks-ai/id1232780281" ], "countries": [ "us" ], "maxReviewsPerApp": 100, "includeReviews": true, "includeReport": true, "includeCharts": true, "trackHistory": true, "onlyNew": false, "proxyConfiguration": { "useApifyProxy": false } } ``` # Actor output Schema ## `results` (type: `string`): One item per review (type "review") as JSON. Add ?format=csv or ?format=xlsx for other formats. ## `reports` (type: `string`): One item per app report (type "app") with the analytics, in its own dataset. Add ?format=csv or ?format=xlsx for other formats. ## `comparison` (type: `string`): Apps side by side per country: store vs recent rating, latest release change, bad release, top complaint, cheapest purchase in USD, chart ranks, alerts. ## `runSummary` (type: `string`): Results, retries and failed requests per error category, and why the run failed if it did. # API You can run this Actor programmatically using our API. Below are code examples in JavaScript, Python, and CLI, as well as the OpenAPI specification and MCP server setup. ## JavaScript example ```javascript import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client'; // Initialize the ApifyClient with your Apify API token // Replace the '' with your token const client = new ApifyClient({ token: '', }); // Prepare Actor input const input = { "apps": [ "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/notion-notes-tasks-ai/id1232780281" ], "countries": [ "us" ], "proxyConfiguration": { "useApifyProxy": false } }; // Run the Actor and wait for it to finish const run = await client.actor("steadywren/apple-app-store-reviews-scraper").call(input); // Fetch and print Actor results from the run's dataset (if any) console.log('Results from dataset'); console.log(`💾 Check your data here: https://console.apify.com/storage/datasets/${run.defaultDatasetId}`); const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems(); items.forEach((item) => { console.dir(item); }); // 📚 Want to learn more 📖? Go to → https://docs.apify.com/api/client/js/docs ``` ## Python example ```python from apify_client import ApifyClient # Initialize the ApifyClient with your Apify API token # Replace '' with your token. client = ApifyClient("") # Prepare the Actor input run_input = { "apps": ["https://apps.apple.com/us/app/notion-notes-tasks-ai/id1232780281"], "countries": ["us"], "proxyConfiguration": { "useApifyProxy": False }, } # Run the Actor and wait for it to finish run = client.actor("steadywren/apple-app-store-reviews-scraper").call(run_input=run_input) # Fetch and print Actor results from the run's dataset (if there are any) print(f"💾 Check your data here: https://console.apify.com/storage/datasets/{run.default_dataset_id}") for item in client.dataset(run.default_dataset_id).iterate_items(): print(item) # 📚 Want to learn more 📖? Go to → https://docs.apify.com/api/client/python/docs/quick-start ``` ## CLI example ```bash echo '{ "apps": [ "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/notion-notes-tasks-ai/id1232780281" ], "countries": [ "us" ], "proxyConfiguration": { "useApifyProxy": false } }' | apify call steadywren/apple-app-store-reviews-scraper --silent --output-dataset ``` ## MCP server setup ```json { "mcpServers": { "apify": { "type": "http", "url": "https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=fetch-actor-details,steadywren/apple-app-store-reviews-scraper" } } } ``` The hosted server signs you in with OAuth on first connect, so no API token belongs in this config. Clients without OAuth support can send an `Authorization: Bearer ` header instead, using a token from API & Integrations in Apify Console (https://console.apify.com/settings/integrations). ## OpenAPI specification Download the OpenAPI definition: https://api.apify.com/v2/actors/wW2ZZqKu33aTCYijR/builds/YKQoO1Qe0YUuiWyGH/openapi.json