How to get alerts for new 1★ and 2★ App Store reviews after every release

#webscraping #api #automation #ios

You ship a new version of your iPhone app, and a day later the rating starts to slide. Usually the reason is right there in the reviews — a crash on launch, a missing button, a login loop — but only if someone reads them in time, in every country you sell in.

This post shows how to pull App Store reviews for any app as JSON, filter them to the low ratings, and get only the new ones on a schedule, so a bad release shows up in Slack instead of in next month's metrics.

1. Find the app ID

Open the app's page on the App Store. The ID is the number at the end of the URL:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/spotify-music-and-podcasts/id324684580

You can use 324684580, id324684580 or the full link. Each country storefront (us, gb, de, jp…) has its own reviews, so list every country you care about.

2. Pull the low-rated reviews

With the App Store Reviews Scraper on Apify, the input looks like this:

{
  "apps": ["324684580"],
  "countries": ["us", "gb", "de"],
  "ratings": ["1", "2"],
  "since": "30 days",
  "sort": "newest",
  "maxReviewsPerApp": 500
}

It reads Apple's public customer-reviews feed — no login, no browser. Every review comes back with rating, title, text, app version, helpful votes and date. The app version is the useful part here: group by app_version and you can see whether the 1★ reviews started with a specific release.

No reviewer names, profile links or avatars are collected.

3. Get only new reviews on a schedule

Turn on Monitor mode and run once. You get the latest reviews as a baseline.
Save the input as an Apify task and add a schedule — daily, or hourly in the days after a release.
Every later run returns only reviews that were not returned before. If nothing new came in, the dataset is empty.

Then connect the dataset to Slack, Google Sheets or a webhook with Apify's built-in integrations.

Limits worth knowing

Apple's public feed exposes about 500 reviews per country and sort order. For more history, add countries or also run most_helpful, and use monitor mode to build your own archive over time.
Developer replies are not in Apple's public feed, so developer_reply is always empty.
Reviews can take up to about a day to appear in the feed.

Cost

Pricing is pay per event: $0.25 per 1,000 reviews plus $0.002 per run. Reviews dropped by your filters or already delivered in monitor mode are not charged. 10,000 reviews cost about $2.50, and a monitor run that finds nothing new costs only the start fee.

This article was written with the help of AI and checked against the tool's own test results. I build and maintain the Steadyrow scrapers on Apify.

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