Ultimate Google Play Review Extractor

An Apify actor that scrapes and structures public reviews from the Google Play Store. It's built for reliable, large-scale data extraction without browser automation, outputting clean data ready for analysis.

Categories: DEVELOPER_TOOLS, LEAD_GENERATION

Overview

This actor extracts reviews from any Google Play app using the official google-play-scraper library. It's designed for production use, handling pagination, proxies, and input validation automatically. You can run it on the Apify platform or locally via Node.js.

The primary goal is to turn unstructured app feedback into structured datasets (JSON, CSV) containing review text, ratings, dates, app versions, and sentiment. It's used by product, marketing, and data teams for competitive analysis, feature planning, and sentiment tracking.

Key Features

• High-Fidelity Data: Uses the battle-tested google-play-scraper library, avoiding brittle Selenium scripts.
• Production-Ready: Includes precision pagination, cursor tracking, and safeguards against infinite loops.
• Proxy Support: Configure Apify proxy groups or custom HTTP proxies for geo-specific scraping.
• Defensive Design: Validates inputs, clamps delays, sanitizes filters, and fails fast on invalid app IDs.
• Instant First Run: Ships with a default input (Spotify's app) so you get real output immediately on your first test.
• Clean Output: Emits structured JSON objects that integrate directly into BI tools, spreadsheets, or ML pipelines.

How to Use

You can run the actor from the Apify Console or locally.

Quick Start (Under 5 Minutes)

A pre-configured input is provided. Use this JSON as your starting point:

{
  "action": "scrapeReviews",
  "count": 1,
  "maxDelay": 3,
  "minDelay": 1,
  "scrapeReviews.appId": "com.spotify.music",
  "cursor": ""
}

Steps:
1. Open the actor in the Apify Console or your local environment.
2. Use the input JSON above. To scrape a different app, replace the scrapeReviews.appId value (e.g., com.whatsapp).
3. If running locally: Install dependencies with npm install.
4. Start the actor:
* Apify Console: Paste the input and press Run.
* Locally: Run APIFY_INPUT='<your_json>' node src/main.js.
5. Export the resulting dataset from Apify in your preferred format (JSON, CSV, Excel, etc.).

Input Configuration

The main input parameters are:

• scrapeReviews.appId: (Required) The Google Play app package ID (e.g., com.spotify.music).
• count: The number of reviews to scrape per request.
• minDelay / maxDelay: Controls the delay between requests to avoid rate limiting.
• cursor: Used for pagination; typically left as an empty string to start.

Input / Output

Input: A JSON object specifying the target app and scraping parameters. The appId is the only required field for a basic run.

Output: A structured dataset containing an array of review objects. Each object typically includes:

• reviewId: Unique identifier for the review.
• userName: Name of the reviewer.
• userImage: URL to the reviewer's image.
• content: The full text of the review.
• score: The star rating (1-5).
• thumbsUpCount: Number of "helpful" votes.
• reviewCreatedVersion: App version when the review was written.
• at: Date and time of the review (ISO format).
• replyContent: Text of the developer's reply (if any).
• repliedAt: Date of the developer's reply.

The data is stored in the actor's dataset on Apify and can be downloaded directly via the console or through the Apify API.