Reading App Store Reviews with an RSS Reader
March 14, 2018
A recent conversation on the Core Intuition Slack channel got me thinking about keeping up with customer App Store reviews via RSS. Apple provides Atom feeds for reviews, but to get all reviews you need to subscribe to one feed per storefront (country). Apple’s feeds include star ratings, but not in a manner that an aggregation service will absorb or that a reader will display. Finally, the feed names do not include the product name, so it is not always apparent what app a review is discussing.
I took some time to write a script to address this. The script combines all recent reviews of an app into a single JSON Feed. It embeds the star rating into the review content. It also embeds a Google Translate link into the content so that if the review is in a foreign language I can get a translation with one tap. My web server runs the script periodically and I subscribe to the resulting feeds.
The script is available on GitHub for anyone else who might find it useful.