App store reviews reader

To fetch app store reviews from publicly available RSS feeds.

App store provide RSS feed as follows -

https://itunes.apple.com/{country}/rss/customerreviews/id={app_id}/xml

It provides feed in xml and json format but xml feed have more information like review_id and vote_count etc. Hence xml feed is used along with feedparser to parse feed.

Installation

Install via PyPi:

pip install app-store-reviews-reader

Install from master branch (if you want to try the latest features):

git clone https://github.com/lalitpagaria/app_store_reviews_reader
cd app_store_reviews_reader
pip install --editable .

How to use

AppStoreReviewsReader require two parameters app_id and country. app_id can be found at the end of the url of app in app store. For example -

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/xcode/id497799835

310633997 is the app_id for xcode and us is country.

Now you can run the following example -

import pprint
from datetime import datetime, timedelta

import pytz as pytz

from app_store.app_store_reviews_reader import AppStoreReviewsReader

# app_id, and country of xcode
reader = AppStoreReviewsReader(
    app_id="497799835",
    country="us"
)

# To fetch reviews entered in past 5 days
since_time = datetime.utcnow().astimezone(pytz.utc) + timedelta(days=-5)

# fetch_reviews will fetch all reviews if not parameters are passed.
# If `after` is passed then it will fetch all reviews after this date
# If `since_id` is passed then it will fetch all reviews after this review_id
reviews = reader.fetch_reviews(
    after=since_time
)

pp = pprint.PrettyPrinter(indent=4)
for review in reviews:
    pp.pprint(review.__dict__)

Review contains following information -

@dataclass
class Review:
    version: str
    rating: int
    id: int
    title: str
    content: str
    date: datetime
    author_link: str
    author_name: str
    country: str
    vote_count: Optional[int] = 0
    vote_sum: Optional[int] = 0

The output is given with UTF-8 charsets, if you are scraping non-english App Store set the environment to use UTF -

export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
export PYTHONIOENCODING=utf-8