Google Play Store Review Extractor

Modern command line utility for downloading reviews of an Android application from the Google Play Store. The original version of this project relied on a hard-coded Selenium workflow that no longer worked with the Play Store UI. This updated tool uses the google-play-scraper library to access reviews directly via HTTP requests, making it faster and more reliable.

Features

• Fetch reviews for any public Play Store app by app id (e.g. com.spotify.music).
• Choose the number of reviews, language, country and sort order.
• Optional filtering by star rating.
• Save reviews as CSV or JSON.
• Friendly CLI with sensible defaults and helpful error messages.

Requirements

• Python 3.9 or newer
• google-play-scraper

Install the dependency with:

pip install google-play-scraper

Usage

Run the script directly with Python. Examples below assume the current working directory is the repository root.

Download reviews to CSV (default)

python reviews_extraction.py com.spotify.music --count 200

The command above saves up to 200 of the newest English reviews from the US storefront into com_spotify_music_reviews.csv.

Customising requests

• Use --lang and --country to request a specific locale.
• Use --sort with one of relevant, newest (default) or rating.
• Use --score to keep only reviews with a given star rating (1-5).

python reviews_extraction.py com.nintendo.zara --count 100 --lang fr --country ca --sort rating --score 5

JSON output

python reviews_extraction.py com.spotify.music --format json --output spotify.json

If --output is omitted when using --format json, the JSON document is written to stdout.

Overwriting files

To replace an existing output file pass --overwrite:

python reviews_extraction.py com.spotify.music -n 50 --overwrite

Output columns (CSV)

The CSV writer stores the following columns:

• review_id
• user_name
• user_image
• score
• thumbs_up_count
• review_created_version
• app_version
• content
• reply_content
• at (ISO 8601 timestamp)
• replied_at (ISO 8601 timestamp)

Troubleshooting

• Empty output – the chosen locale or filters might not have any reviews.
• HTTP errors – retry later; the library respects Google rate limits but the Play Store occasionally blocks repeated requests temporarily.

Feel free to open an issue or submit a PR if you encounter a bug or have ideas for improvements.