app-store-scraper

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Quickstart

Install:

pip3 install app-store-scraper

Scrape reviews for an app:

from app_store_scraper import AppStore
from pprint import pprint

minecraft = AppStore(country="nz", app_name="minecraft")
minecraft.review(how_many=20)

pprint(minecraft.reviews)
pprint(minecraft.reviews_count)

Scrape reviews for a podcast:

from app_store_scraper import Podcast
from pprint import pprint

sysk = Podcast(country="nz", app_name="stuff you should know")
sysk.review(how_many=20)

pprint(sysk.reviews)
pprint(sysk.reviews_count)

Extra Details

Let's continue from the code example used in Quickstart.

Instantiation

There are two required and one positional parameters:

• country (required)
  • two-letter country code of ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 standard
• app_name (required)
  • name of an iOS application to fetch reviews for
  • also used by search_id() method to search for app_id internally
• app_id (positional)
  • can be passed directly
  • or ignored to be obtained by search_id method internally

Once instantiated, the object can be examined:

>>> minecraft
AppStore(country='nz', app_name='minecraft', app_id=479516143)

>>> print(app)
     Country | nz
        Name | minecraft
          ID | 479516143
         URL | https://apps.apple.com/nz/app/minecraft/id479516143
Review count | 0

Other optional parameters are:

• log_format
  • passed directly to logging.basicConfig(format=log_format)
  • default is "%(asctime)s [%(levelname)s] %(name)s - %(message)s"
• log_level
  • passed directly to logging.basicConfig(level=log_level)
  • default is "INFO"
• log_interval
  • log is produced every 5 seconds (by default) as a "heartbeat" (useful for a long scraping session)
  • default is 5

Fetching Review

The maximum number of reviews fetched per request is 20. To minimise the number of calls, the limit of 20 is hardcoded. This means the review() method will always grab more than the how_many argument supplied with an increment of 20.

>>> minecraft.review(how_many=33)
>>> minecraft.reviews_count
40

If how_many is not provided, review() will terminate after all reviews are fetched.

NOTE the review count seen on the landing page differs from the actual number of reviews fetched. This is simply because only some users who rated the app also leave reviews.

Optional Parameters

• after
  • a datetime object to filter older reviews
• sleep
  • an int to specify seconds to sleep between each call

Review Data

The fetched review data are loaded in memory and live inside reviews attribute as a list of dict.

>>> minecraft.reviews
[{'userName': 'someone', 'rating': 5, 'date': datetime.datetime(...

Each review dictionary has the following schema:

{
    "date": datetime.datetime,
    "isEdited": bool,
    "rating": int,
    "review": str,
    "title": str,
    "userName": str
 }