How to fetch Google Play and App Store reviews via JSON without a browser

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A developer discovered that both Google Play and the Apple App Store expose app reviews as plain JSON accessible via direct HTTP requests, eliminating the need for headless browsers or proxies. Apple provides reviews through a documented RSS-to-JSON endpoint supporting up to 10 pages of 50 reviews each per storefront, while Google Play uses an undocumented batchexecute API with token-based pagination. The author used the got-scraping library, which mimics a real browser's TLS fingerprint, to avoid 403 errors that standard HTTP clients like axios triggered due to Play Store's TLS-level fingerprinting. Key differences between the two platforms include Play reviews lacking titles and developer replies being absent from Apple's public feed, requiring a nullable title field when merging data from both stores. The author also warns that Google's positional JSON format for Play reviews is inherently fragile, as slot indices can shift without notice, and recommends adding request throttling before using this approach at large scale.

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