App Store Reviews Scraper

Extract public Apple App Store customer reviews from the official iTunes customer-reviews RSS JSON endpoint. Each review is enriched with public app metadata from the official iTunes Lookup or Search JSON endpoint.

Source and behavior

• Public HTTPS requests go only to itunes.apple.com.
• The actor accepts numeric App Store IDs and/or app names, a country code, review sort order, bounded page/review limits, and optional rating/version/date filters.
• Review rows include the review ID, title, body, rating, author information, version, votes, update time, review URL, app metadata, request URLs, response evidence, and direct-transport flags.
• A request is made once, sequentially, with a fixed transparent user agent. There is no browser automation, proxy, retry, login, or access-control bypass.
• HTTP errors, challenge responses, malformed feeds, missing apps, and filter-empty results are saved in the bounded OUTPUT_SUMMARY record, never mixed into the review dataset.
• Null, blank, and empty values are removed before output. No review text or app field is fabricated.

The default app ID is Instagram (389801252) because its public review feed is available through the observed iTunes endpoint. This Actor's authoritative public rank is 166 and its Actor ID is jHud9d9OUqMECgM9Q.

Local run

npm ci
apify validate-schema
apify run --purge

The run writes public review rows to the default dataset and a bounded OUTPUT_SUMMARY object to the default key-value store.

Code structure

• src/main.js is the thin process entrypoint.
• src/actor.js owns Apify initialization, failure logging, and shutdown.
• src/runner.js contains the bounded public iTunes workflow.
• src/parser.js contains normalization and review/app parsing helpers.
• validate-datasets.js checks the local dataset and OUTPUT_SUMMARY after a run.