{"slug": "find-your-competitor-s-weak-spots-export-app-store-and-google-play-reviews-and", "title": "Find your competitor's weak spots: export App Store and Google Play reviews and let AI sort the complaints", "summary": "A developer built an Apify scraper that exports App Store and Google Play reviews into a uniform schema, letting teams filter 1-3 star complaints and feed them to Claude or ChatGPT for thematic ranking. The workflow surfaces competitor weak spots by grouping complaints, weighting them by thumbsUpCount, and flagging themes that began after a specific appVersion. Apple caps exports at the latest 500 reviews per app, country and sort order, while Google Play has no fixed limit; the Actor is priced at $0.25 per 1,000 reviews.", "body_md": "Before you build an app, the most useful research is free and public: **what people hate about the apps that already exist.** It sits in the 1- and 2-star reviews on the App Store and Google Play.\n\nThe problem is getting it out. The stores show a few reviews at a time, Apple and Google format them differently, and copy-pasting 2,000 reviews into a chat window is not a plan.\n\nThis post shows a simple workflow:\n\nI'll use the [App Store & Google Play Reviews Scraper](https://apify.com/trendcraft/app-reviews-scraper) on Apify. Disclosure: I built it. It takes App Store and Google Play links side by side and returns the same fields for both, which is what makes the AI step easy.\n\n`https://apps.apple.com/us/app/.../id1234567890`` https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.example.app`\nPlain IDs work too (`1234567890`, `com.example.app`).\n\n`us`, `gb`, `de`... Reviews are collected separately for each country.` 500`.` newest` to see what people complain about Every row looks the same, whichever store it came from:\n\n```\n{\n  \"store\": \"googlePlay\",\n  \"appName\": \"ChatGPT\",\n  \"country\": \"us\",\n  \"rating\": 2,\n  \"title\": null,\n  \"text\": \"Keeps logging me out after the last update...\",\n  \"date\": \"2026-10-19T14:18:56\",\n  \"appVersion\": \"1.2026.279\",\n  \"thumbsUpCount\": 14\n}\n```\n\n`rating`, `appVersion` and `thumbsUpCount` are the useful columns: you can filter to low ratings, see which version broke something, and weight complaints by how many people agreed.\n\n**Limits to know:** Apple only shares the latest 500 reviews per app, country and sort order. To get more from the App Store, add countries or run both sort orders. Google Play has no fixed limit.\n\nYou don't need 5-star \"great app!!\" reviews for this. In Google Sheets or Excel, filter `rating` to **1, 2 and 3**. For a popular app, that's usually a few hundred rows, small enough for any AI chat.\n\nOr in Python:\n\n``` python\nimport pandas as pd\n\ndf = pd.read_csv(\"dataset.csv\")\nbad = df[df[\"rating\"] <= 3].sort_values(\"thumbsUpCount\", ascending=False)\nbad[[\"store\", \"rating\", \"appVersion\", \"thumbsUpCount\", \"title\", \"text\"]].to_csv(\"complaints.csv\", index=False)\nprint(len(bad), \"complaints saved\")\n```\n\nUpload `complaints.csv` to Claude or ChatGPT and use a prompt like this:\n\n```\nThese are 1-3 star reviews of [APP NAME] from the App Store and Google Play.\n1. Group them into themes (bugs, pricing, missing features, UX, support...).\n2. For each theme give: number of reviews, total thumbsUpCount, and 2 short quotes.\n3. Rank themes by how painful and how common they are.\n4. List the top 5 feature requests people explicitly ask for.\n5. Note any theme that started after a specific appVersion.\nBe concrete. Do not invent reviews that are not in the file.\n```\n\nWhat you get back is a ranked map of the competitor's weak spots, with real quotes as evidence. The \"started after version X\" question often finds the best opportunities: users who were happy until an update broke something are actively looking for an alternative.\n\nA few patterns that come up again and again:\n\nRun the same export for 3-5 competing apps and compare the themes side by side. That's an afternoon of work instead of weeks of guessing.\n\nThe official `apify-client` package runs the same scraper from Python:\n\n``` python\nfrom apify_client import ApifyClient\n\nclient = ApifyClient(\"YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN\")\n\nrun = client.actor(\"trendcraft/app-reviews-scraper\").call(run_input={\n    \"apps\": [\"389801252\", \"com.instagram.android\"],\n    \"countries\": [\"us\", \"gb\"],\n    \"maxReviewsPerApp\": 500,\n    \"sort\": \"newest\",\n})\n\nreviews = list(client.dataset(run[\"defaultDatasetId\"]).iterate_items())\nprint(len(reviews), \"reviews\")\n```\n\nResults are priced per review; the current price is on the Actor's **Pricing** tab. At the time of writing it is $0.25 per 1,000 reviews, so a 2,000-review study costs about fifty cents.\n\nIf you only need Google Play reviews and are comfortable with Python, the free `google-play-scraper` library works well. The Actor is useful when you want **both stores in one format**, several countries in one run, a scheduled daily export, or no code at all.\n\nQuestions or a missing field? Open an issue on the Actor's **Issues** tab.\n\n*This post was drafted with AI assistance; input names and output fields were checked against the Actor itself.*", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/find-your-competitor-s-weak-spots-export-app-store-and-google-play-reviews-and", "canonical_source": "https://dev.to/kazm_cemz_7f4650563415/find-your-competitors-weak-spots-export-app-store-and-google-play-reviews-and-let-ai-sort-the-5hl4", "published_at": "2026-10-21 21:50:50+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-10-21 22:11:12.856079+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-tools", "ai-products"], "entities": ["Apify", "App Store", "Google Play", "Claude", "ChatGPT", "OpenAI", "Anthropic"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/find-your-competitor-s-weak-spots-export-app-store-and-google-play-reviews-and", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/find-your-competitor-s-weak-spots-export-app-store-and-google-play-reviews-and.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/find-your-competitor-s-weak-spots-export-app-store-and-google-play-reviews-and.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/find-your-competitor-s-weak-spots-export-app-store-and-google-play-reviews-and.jsonld"}}