Reading reviews one by one in the consoles is fine — until you want to analyze them, share them or feed them into another tool. Here are the official ways to get app reviews out of the App Store and Google Play, and what each one is good for.
Apple App Store
App Store Connect API
The App Store Connect API has endpoints for customer reviews: you can list the reviews of an app (filterable by territory and rating) and create or update developer responses.
- Good for: your own apps, automated pipelines, replying programmatically.
- Needs: an API key created in App Store Connect (Users and Access → Integrations), and JWT-signed requests.
- Limits: only apps in your account; you page through results per app.
The public customer reviews RSS feed
Apple has long offered a public RSS/JSON feed of recent reviews per app and country, in the form:
https://itunes.apple.com/{country}/rss/customerreviews/id={appId}/sortBy=mostRecent/json
- Good for: quick looks, competitor apps, prototypes — no authentication.
- Limits: only recent reviews (a few hundred per country), one country per request, no guarantees about format or availability.
Google Play
Google Play Developer API (reviews)
The Reviews resource of the Google Play Developer API lets you list reviews and reply to them.
- Good for: near-real-time processing of new reviews and automated replies.
- Limits: it only returns reviews with text that were created or changed in roughly the last week — it's for keeping up, not for history. Only your own apps.
Play Console review reports (CSV)
In the Google Play Console, Download reports → Reviews gives you monthly CSV files with reviews, ratings, device and app version. They're stored in a Google Cloud Storage bucket linked to your account, which you can also access with gsutil for automation.
- Good for: historical analysis, spreadsheets, BI tools.
- Limits: monthly files, not real time.
Which method should you use?
| Goal | iOS | Android |
|---|---|---|
| History in a spreadsheet | App Store Connect API | Play Console CSV reports |
| New reviews as they arrive | App Store Connect API (polling) | Play Developer API |
| Competitor apps | Public RSS feed | — (no official API) |
| Reply automatically | App Store Connect API | Play Developer API |
Building your own review alerts
A homegrown pipeline usually looks like this: poll the APIs every hour, store review IDs to avoid duplicates, translate non-English reviews, and post new ones to Slack with an incoming webhook. It works — but you'll maintain API keys, handle dozens of storefronts and fix it when formats change.
If what you actually want is every new review in a channel, allstarsbot does exactly that for any App Store or Google Play app — including competitors — with one-click translations and reply links. See how to get App Store and Google Play reviews in Slack.
What to do with exported reviews
- Tag reviews by topic and track counts per app version — useful during a phased release.
- Run review sentiment analysis across months.
- Compare your reviews with competitors' — see competitor app analysis.
- Find the words users use for your app and test them as App Store keywords.
