App Review Code

Simple code to allow the gathering and processing of public reviews of apps on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store APIs.

Getting the Data

App review data is obtained from the App Store and Googl Play Store APIs. Example code for this is shown in the get_review_data folder.

The Apple App Store Review API

Reviews on published apps in the Apple App store are openly available. A limited number of reviews can be accessed via a rss call to:

https://itunes.apple.com/{country}/rss/customerreviews/page={page_no}/id={app_id}/sortBy=mostRecent/json

• country is the App Store country where you sell it, e.g. gb
• page_no is the page of the data to return - data is from paginated
• app_id is the number following "id" in the App Store URL

The example Python code calls the API the requests library. The resulting nested JSON is flattened and saves as a CSV file.

An example of format returned by the API is give in the example_apple_reviews.json file

Example Use

The following code will go get the last 500 reviews and process the JSON response into a flat CSV file. Results from the api are paginated up to a maximum of 10 pages

    no_of_pages = 10
    review_id = 1234567890       
    all_reviews = get_and_collect_reviews(review_id, no_of_pages) 
    save_reviews(all_reviews, define_csv_file_name() )

The Google Play Store Review API

The Google Play reviews are accessed via the Play Console using a private key using oauth2. This should be generated by the app administrator on the Google Play Console. Accessing the Google Play API within Python can be acheived using

    from google.oauth2 import service_account
    from apiclient.discovery import build
    
    # TODO: read in the credentials from a JSON file, converyt to dict and assign to 'credentials_dict'
    
    try:
        credentials = service_account.Credentials.from_service_account_info(credentials_dict)
    except Exception as e:
         print(e) 
         return   
    # Get list of reviews using googleapiclient.discovery
    try:      
        service = googleapiclient.discovery.build('androidpublisher', 'v3', credentials=credentials)
        response = service.reviews().list(packageName='uk.organisation.appname.production').execute()
    except Exception as e:
         print(e) 
         return
  
    if not 'reviews' in response or len(response['reviews']) == 0:
        print('No reviews available')
    else:
        print('Reviews detected.')
        # Save or process the response, e.g. save the json.dumps(response) to a JSON file
        ...

For the format and details of the returned data please see the Google Review API Documnetation

Example Use

The processing code currently assumes the response has been saved as a JSON file and then loaded before further processing. The review data could be processed directly from the response above. Assuming the JSON has been loaded to a variable reviews_j:

# Process the reviews toa flast file
all_review_data = process_json(review_j)

# You can save the reviews to CSV file directly
save_reviews(all_review_data, define_csv_file_name())

# Or convert to a Pandas dataframe abnd manipluate as required
all_reviews = pd.DataFrame(all_review_data)