app-store-web-scraper 0.2.0

Scrape reviews from Apple's App Store

🍏🔍 App Store Web Scraper

app-store-web-scraper is a Python package for extracting reviews for iOS, iPadOS, macOS and tvOS apps from the web version of Apple's App Store.

Note: Whenever possible, prefer using Apple's App Store Connect API, which provides the full set of customer review data for your apps and is more reliable.

• Installation
• Basic Usage
  • App IDs
  • App Store Entries
  • App Reviews
• Advanced Usage
  • Sessions
• How It Works
• License
• Acknowledgements

Installation

At the moment, this package not yet available on PyPI, but can be installed directly from GitHub as a source package:

pip install app-store-web-scraper

Basic Usage

The sample code below fetches the 10 most recent app reviews for Minecraft.

from app_store_web_scraper import AppStoreEntry

# See below for instructions on finding an app's ID.
MINECRAFT_APP_ID = 479516143

# Look up the app in the British version of the App Store.
app = AppStoreEntry(app_id=MINECRAFT_APP_ID, country="gb")

# Iterate over the app's reviews, which are fetched lazily in batches.
for review in app.reviews():
    print("-----")
    print("ID:", review.id)
    print("Rating:", review.rating)
    print("Review:", review.content)

App IDs

app-store-web-scraper requires you to pass the App Store ID of the app(s) you are interested in. To find an app's ID, find out its App Store page URL by searching for the app on apple.com or in the App Store app (use Share → Copy Link). The ID is the last part of the URL's path, without the "id" prefix.

For example, the URL of the Minecraft app (on the British App Store) is https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/multicraft-build-and-mine/id1174039276, from which one can extract the app ID 1174039276.

App Store Entries

To start scraping an app in the App Store, create an AppStoreEntry instance with an app ID and the (lowercase) ISO code of the country whose App Store should be scraped. If the app ID is invalid or the app is not available in the specified region, an AppNotFound error is raised.

The entry's reviews() method returns an iterator that can be used to fetch some or all of the app reviews available through the App Store's public API. Note that this is usually only a small subset of all reviews that the app received, so the number of reviews retrieved will not match the review count displayed on the App Store page.

App Reviews

Each review is returned as an AppReview object with the following attributes:

• id
• date
• user_name
• rating
• title
• review
• developer_response (if the developer replied)
  • id
  • body
  • modified

The list of reviews split into pages by the App Store's servers, so iterating over all reviews will regularly make a network request to fetch the next page. To limit the total amount of network requests, you can pass a limit to reviews() so that only a certain maximum amount of app reviews is returned by the iterator. By default, no limit is set.

Advanced Usage

Sessions

The AppStoreSession class implements the communication with the App Store's servers. Internally, it uses an urllib3.PoolManager the reuse HTTP connections between requests, which reduces the load on Apple's servers and increases performance.

By default, AppStoreEntry takes care of creating an AppStoreSession itself, so you don't need to deal with sessions for simple use cases. However, constructing and passing an AppStoreSession manually can be beneficial for two reasons. First, it allows you to share a session between multiple AppStoreEntry objects for additional efficiency:

from app_store_web_scraper import AppStoreEntry, AppStoreSession

session = AppStoreSession()
pages = AppStoreEntry(app_id=361309726, country="de", session=session)
numbers = AppStoreEntry(app_id=361304891, country="de", session=session)

# ...

Second, you can pass several parameters to AppStoreSession to control how requests to the App Store are handled. For instance:

session = AppStoreSession(
  # Wait between 0.4 and 0.6 seconds before every request after the first,
  # to avoid being rate-limited by Apple's servers
  delay=0.5,
  delay_jitter=0.1,

  # Retry failed requests up to 5 times, with an initial backoff time of
  # 0.5 seconds that doubles after each failed retry (but is capped at 20
  # seconds)
  retries=5,
  retries_backoff_factor=3,
  retries_backoff_max=20,
)

For a list of all available parameters with descriptions, see the docstring of the AppStoreSession class.

How It Works

To fetch app reviews, this library uses the undocumented iTunes Customer Reviews API, which offers the following endpoint to retrieve the pages of an app's reviews feed in JSON format:

https://itunes.apple.com/{country}/rss/customerreviews/page={page}/id={app_id}/sortby=mostrecent/json

app_id and country are the respective values passed to the AppStoreEntry. page is a number between 1 and 10 (the highest allowed page number). Each page contains up to 50 reviews, which results in the maximum number of 500 reviews per app ID and country.

License

app-store-web-scraper is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. See the LICENSE file for more details.

Acknowledgements

This library is a fork and rewrite of app-store-scraper by Eric Lim and takes further inspiration from the Node.js package of the same name by Facundo Olando. Without these authors' efforts, this library would not exist. 💚