Apple App Store Competitor Monitor

Monitor Apple App Store apps for listing, version, price, rating, screenshot, and written-review changes. The Actor keeps state in an Apify Key-Value Store and writes Dataset records only when something changes.

It uses Apple's public lookup and customer-review JSON endpoints. It does not use a browser, proxy, Apple App Store Connect account, external database, or AI service.

Input

apps accepts numeric App Store IDs or complete apps.apple.com URLs containing an ID. countries defaults to us and is normalized to lowercase. A run allows at most 100 apps, 20 countries, and 500 app-country targets.

{
  "apps": ["284882215", "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/example/id123456789"],
  "countries": ["us", "gb"],
  "includeReviews": true,
  "negativeReviewMaxRating": 3,
  "emitExistingReviewsOnFirstRun": false,
  "resetState": false
}

The default first run creates a baseline and emits one baseline_created event per target. Existing reviews are stored but not emitted. Later successful checks emit no Dataset rows when nothing changed.

Events

The Dataset can contain baseline_created, metadata_changed, version_changed, price_changed, rating_changed, screenshots_changed, new_review, and review_updated records. Every event has an idempotent eventId, app/storefront identity, timestamp, and before/after values where applicable.

Rating count changes are retained as internal observations but do not produce noisy Dataset events by themselves. A review is negative when its rating is less than or equal to negativeReviewMaxRating.

Billing

The deployed Actor charges one app_check pay-per-event unit ($0.002) only after a target completes successfully, output is written, and its state is committed. Failed targets are reported in the run-level OUTPUT summary and are not charged.

app_check is configured in the Actor's Apify Console monetization settings as one successfully completed app-storefront check. Apify stores Store pricing on the platform rather than in the source Actor manifest.

Scheduling

Use an ordinary Apify Schedule or Task Schedule for hourly, daily, or weekly checks. State is keyed by app ID and storefront, so the same app can be monitored independently in multiple countries.

Examples

Own app review monitoring:

{"apps":["123456789"],"countries":["us"],"includeReviews":true,"negativeReviewMaxRating":3}

Competitor listing monitoring without review requests:

{"apps":["111111111","222222222","333333333"],"countries":["us"],"includeReviews":false}

Multi-country monitoring:

{"apps":["111111111","222222222"],"countries":["us","gb","de","fr","jp"]}