Skip to main content

Scraping Apple Store Reviews

Problem​

How to scrap Apple Store Reviews? There are some python libs but they have difficulties to work...

Solution​

We can use the lib apple-store-scraper (19 stars on 01/09/2023, last update: 24/04/2023). This is a fork of the lib app-store-scraper which is marked as deprecated on GitHub and is not maintained any more since 2021. I did not find any other working libraries (they all seem to be deprecated).

Limitations​

  • The dependencies of the lib specifies requests==2.25.0, which is an old version, and so making dependencies resolution often failing with poetry. You can install it manually with pip instead.
  • The search_id feature does not work anymore due to a Google Update, you have to pass the app_id param to the AppStore instance to make it work.

Example​

from apple_store_scraper import AppStore

app = AppStore(
	country="fr",
	app_name="SNCF Connect",
	app_id="343889987",  # find it in the url
	log_level="error"  # hide logs (optional)
)

# fetch reviews
app.review(how_many=400)

# transform to DataFrame
data = pd.DataFrame(
	app.reviews,
	columns=["date", "review", "rating", "title", "userName"],
)