Developer builds unified tool to scrape app reviews from Apple and Google Play

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A developer frustrated with maintaining separate scrapers for Apple App Store and Google Play Store built a unified tool called App Review Monitor. The tool normalizes reviews from both platforms into a consistent ten-field JSON format, covering fields like store, rating, title, review text, and app version. Apple's public RSS feed requires no authentication, while Google Play data is accessed via the google-play-scraper library, making DIY integration possible. Paid alternatives such as Appfigures and Appbot exist but start at $9.99 per month. The open tool collects only publicly available review data, hashes author identifiers for privacy, and raises loud errors when an app cannot be fetched.

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