Apple Podcasts Reviews Monitor API | Ratings + Reviews

Monitor new ratings and customer reviews for Apple Podcast shows across any country storefront via the official iTunes Customer Reviews RSS JSON feed. No login, no API key.

Status

Scaffolded as part of Wave 18 Amplify — Apple Podcasts winner derivatives. Domain logic lives in src/workflow.js and makes live calls to iTunes public endpoints.

Feasibility

Very high — iTunes Customer Reviews RSS is a public JSON endpoint: itunes.apple.com/{country}/rss/customerreviews/id={id}/sortby=mostrecent/json. No auth, no key, no browser.

V1 scope

iTunes Customer Reviews RSS JSON only. Per review: podcast ID, country, reviewer name, rating (1-5), title, content, version reviewed, review date. OUT OF SCOPE: publisher responses, flag-for-removal actions, aggregated average rating (can be derived), historical review volumes beyond the 500-entry feed depth.

Extraction surfaces

• Customer Reviews: https://itunes.apple.com/{country}/rss/customerreviews/id={id}/sortby=mostrecent/json
• Paged: https://itunes.apple.com/{country}/rss/customerreviews/page={n}/id={id}/sortby=mostrecent/json

Known limitations and explicit warnings

• iTunes Customer Reviews feed depth is capped at 500 most-recent reviews per country per show (10 pages × 50).
• Reviews that have been removed (abuse/spam) vanish from the feed; the actor cannot resurrect them.
• Per-country feeds are separate — a review posted from Japan appears only in the jp storefront feed.
• The rating is the in-review star rating, not the show's aggregate score; aggregate score is not exposed in this feed.
• Publisher responses are not included in the V1 output shape; Apple surfaces them only in the Apple Podcasts app.
• Reviewer names are author-controlled display names and may be pseudonyms.
• Review dates are in the country's local format per feed; the actor normalizes to ISO 8601 UTC.
• Very popular shows accumulate tens of thousands of reviews globally; the 500-entry cap may miss older reviews — paginate aggressively for initial backfills.
• Some storefronts occasionally return empty JSON for shows with zero reviews; the actor records this explicitly rather than erroring.

Input

• Apple Podcast IDs and country codes
• Delivery mode (dataset or webhook)
• Dry-run support for local validation

Output

• Normalized reviews array
• meta section with implementation status, feasibility note, V1 scope, warnings, and notes

Local run

npm test
npm start