Reviews & changes · App store reviews
App store review monitoring per country storefront
App ratings and reviews are kept per country, so an app can be loved in Germany and struggling in Japan at the same time. Watch each public storefront listing on a schedule — your apps through the official APIs, competitors through their public pages — and see a regional problem the day it starts.
Pay per GB · No subscription · Prices in EUR, excl. VAT
- €0.75
- per GB on ARC Basic, excl. VAT
- −21%
- at 1 TB (€0.59 / GB)
- 185+
- countries, city targeting
- Never
- expires — no subscription
Written for
- App publishers
- ASO specialists
- Mobile product managers
- App market intelligence analysts
The short answer
- Both major app stores keep ratings per country: Apple's summary rating is specific to each storefront, and Google Play shows phone users ratings from their registered country.
- For your own apps, start with the official review APIs. Use public listing pages for competitors and for what the official tools do not show — listing copy, screenshots, rank and the rating a market actually sees.
- Collect each storefront from an exit in its country, so redirects, availability and locale match the market you mean.
- Listing and review pages are light; ARC Basic with country targeting is enough for most storefront sweeps.
The problem
What goes wrong without the right IPs
A global average hides a regional collapse
A release that breaks on one carrier or locale drags ratings down in one storefront while the global picture barely moves. If you only read one country, you find out from support tickets.
The wrong storefront answers
Store web pages can redirect or adjust to the visitor's location. Collected from one office, a 20-country sweep can quietly return the same country's view 20 times.
Official tools only see your own apps
The developer consoles and review APIs cover the apps you publish. Competitor ratings, listing changes and review themes are only visible on the public storefront.
Ratings reset and recent-weighting
A developer can reset a storefront's summary rating on a new version, and stores weight recent ratings. A rating series without a version and date beside it misreads both.
Daily checks across many storefronts add up to a pattern
Fifty apps across twenty storefronts every day is a lot of near-identical requests from one address. Spreading them across a pool keeps the cadence from turning into a rate-limit problem.
What to collect
What you can collect
- Storefront country
- The key for every rating and review — store it as the store reports it, not as you requested it.
- Average rating and rating count
- Per storefront and per collection date; the count tells you whether a move is meaningful.
- Current version and release date
- Lines rating shifts up with releases and explains summary-rating resets.
- Review text, rating, date, language
- The raw material for theme and sentiment analysis per market.
- Developer response present
- Whether and how quickly competitors reply, per market.
- Listing title, subtitle and description
- ASO changes are visible here first; diff them per storefront.
- Screenshot and preview set
- Store a hash per asset — a changed set is a creative test or a localisation push.
- Price and in-app purchase list
- Pricing differs per storefront and is shown on the public listing.
- Category rank where shown
- A coarse visibility signal per country, collected on the same pass.
How it runs
How a collection run works
- 01
Use the official APIs for your own apps
Apple's App Store Connect API lists customer reviews for your apps; Google's Reply to Reviews API returns reviews with comments created or modified within the last week. Pull these first — they are authoritative and need no proxy at all.
- 02
List competitor apps and storefronts
For each competitor app, list the storefronts you care about. Store each listing's URL per country; on the web, the storefront is usually part of the path or a query parameter.
- 03
Fetch each storefront from its own country
Use a rotating exit in the storefront's country. Each request is independent, so there is no session to hold; country targeting is the only token that matters.
One exit country per storefront16 linesimport requestsGATEWAY = "proxy.arcproxies.io:8000"PASSWORD = "PASSWORD"STOREFRONTS = ["de", "gb", "fr", "jp", "us", "br"]def fetch(country: str, url: str) -> str: user = f"USERNAME_pool-arc_country-{country}" proxy = f"http://{user}:{PASSWORD}@{GATEWAY}" r = requests.get(url, proxies={"http": proxy, "https": proxy}, timeout=30) r.raise_for_status() return r.textfor cc in STOREFRONTS: html = fetch(cc, f"https://store.example/{cc}/app/12345") - 04
Diff listings, append reviews
Listing fields are diffed against the last snapshot per storefront; reviews are appended with their own IDs and dates so a re-read never double-counts.
- 05
Alert per market
Alert on a rating drop in one storefront beyond its normal day-to-day noise, a spike of one-star reviews in one language, or a competitor listing change. Global averages go in the weekly report, not the alert.
Setup
Recommended setup
Storefront pages are small and independent, so this is rotating-pool work at country level. Residential is the fallback, not the default.
| Plan | Role | Session | Targeting | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
ARC Basic Rotating ISP | Default for storefront sweeps Listing and review pages are light HTML or JSON. Rotating ISP exits per storefront country at our lowest price per GB carry most of this work. | Rotating | Country | €0.75 / GB €0.59 at 1 TB (−21%) |
ARC Fast Rotating residential | Fallback for stricter storefront pages Residential exits for the storefront pages where ISP addresses see failures you cannot otherwise explain. | Rotating | Country | €2.00 / GB €1.12 at 1 TB (−44%) |
ARC Mobile Mobile 4G/5G | For mobile-network views Carrier IPs in four countries, for checking what a store web page shows a visitor on a mobile network. No city targeting. | Sticky, 5–60 minutes | Country (DE, GB, US, JP) | €3.50 / GB €3.15 at 1 TB (−10%) |
Prices are list prices in EUR, excl. VAT. Volume discounts apply automatically at checkout — full ladder on the pricing page.
Connect
One connection string per market
The country, city and sticky session are tokens in the username. Change the token, change the market; keep the session handle, keep the IP.
http://USERNAME_pool-arcfast_country-de_session-k3f9a1x2_sesstime-10:PASSWORD@proxy.arcproxies.io:8000Swap _country-de for any market you quote. The full grammar is on the residential proxies page.
Illustration
What competitor storefront monitoring costs
An illustration with round numbers — your pages, payloads and retry rate will differ. The arithmetic is the real price ladder.
Assumptions
- Apps monitored
- 50
- Storefronts per app
- 20
- Pages per check
- 4 (listing + 3 review pages)
- Cadence
- once a day
- Weight per page
- 150 KB
- Bandwidth per month
- ≈ 18 GB
On ARC Basic
€13.50per month, excl. VAT
18 GB bought in one purchase at €0.75 / GB (list price).
The same 18 GB on ARC Fast: €36.00 at €2.00 / GB. Route only the jobs that need it through the pricier pool.
Your own apps' reviews come from the official APIs and cost no proxy bandwidth at all. Rendering listings in a full browser with screenshots loaded would multiply the per-page weight several times.
Bandwidth never expires, so a bigger single purchase is only ever cheaper per GB. See the ladder.
In depth
App store reviews, in depth
Why app ratings differ by country storefront
On the App Store, the summary rating is specific to each territory, and a developer can reset it when releasing a new version — although resetting does not remove written reviews. The App Store is available in 175 countries or regions, and a customer's account country decides which storefront they buy from.
Google Play made ratings local in the same direction: from November 2021, phone users started seeing ratings specific to their registered country, and from early 2022 users on tablets, Chromebooks and wearables saw ratings for their device type.
So "what is our rating?" has no single answer. It is a table of storefronts, versions and dates, and the useful monitoring question is which row moved.
| Store | How ratings are scoped | What that means for monitoring |
|---|---|---|
| App Store | Summary rating per country or region; resettable per version | Track per storefront, and store the version beside every rating |
| Google Play | Ratings shown per registered country, and per device type | Track per country; expect phone and tablet views to differ |
Your own apps: official APIs first, proxies second
For apps you publish, the developer tools are the authoritative source. Apple's App Store Connect API has an endpoint that lists all customer reviews for an app. Google's Reply to Reviews API returns reviews with written comments, limited to those created or modified within the last week, with older reviews available as a CSV download from Play Console; retrieval is limited to 200 requests an hour per app.
Use those for your own review inbox and response workflow. The public storefront is still worth collecting for your own apps in one case: to see the listing, rating and price exactly as a visitor in each country sees them, which is the view an ASO test or a localisation change is meant to affect.
Competitors are the opposite case. Their reviews, rating trends and listing changes are only visible on the public storefront, which is where a proxy with country targeting earns its place.
What an exit IP does and does not change on a store page
On store web pages the storefront is usually chosen by the URL — a country segment in the path or a country parameter — not by the visitor's IP alone. That is good news: you can name the storefront explicitly.
The exit country still matters for consistency. Pages can redirect a visitor to their local storefront, adjust language defaults or hide an app that is not available in the visitor's country. Collecting each storefront from its own country removes those differences from the data, and spreading a large daily sweep across a pool keeps it from concentrating on one address. Check what your target actually does with our location testing guide.
Reading reviews per market without fooling yourself
- Normalise by count. A storefront with 40 ratings that drops half a star is noise; one with 40,000 is news.
- Line ratings up with versions. A reset summary rating looks like a jump; it is a new series.
- Keep the language with the review. Machine-translate for themes, but alert on the original-language spike — that is the market that has the problem.
- Watch response behaviour. Whether a competitor answers one-star reviews in one market and not another says a lot about where their support is staffed.
The parent review monitoring page covers change detection in general; sibling hospitality review monitoring applies the same per-market logic to hotels and restaurants.
Works with anything that takes a proxy URL
- Python requests / httpx
- Node.js
- Scrapy
- changedetection.io
- Docker
FAQ
Questions
Something not covered? Write to contact@arcproxies.io.
Are app store ratings different in each country?
Yes. Apple's App Store keeps the summary rating per country or region, and developers can reset it per storefront when they release a new version. Google Play shows phone users ratings from their registered country. One app can therefore have very different ratings in different markets.
Do I need proxies to monitor reviews of my own app?
Usually not for the reviews themselves. Apple's App Store Connect API lists your app's customer reviews, and Google's Reply to Reviews API returns reviews with comments from the last week. Proxies are useful for competitors' public listings and for seeing your own listing as a visitor in each country sees it.
Does the exit IP choose the app store country?
Not usually on its own. On store web pages the storefront is normally part of the URL. The exit country still matters because pages can redirect to the visitor's local storefront, change language defaults or hide apps unavailable in that country, so collecting each storefront from its own country keeps the data consistent.
How much bandwidth does storefront monitoring use?
Store listing and review pages are light. Fifty apps across 20 storefronts, four pages each, once a day at about 150 KB a page comes to around 18 GB a month. Bandwidth never expires, so a quieter month simply leaves a balance.
Can I monitor app store pages from a mobile network?
Yes, with ARC Mobile, which has real carrier IPs in Germany, the UK, the US and Japan. It has no city targeting and sticky sessions of 5 to 60 minutes. For most storefront monitoring, rotating ISP exits on ARC Basic are enough.
Sources & review
Last reviewed by the ARC Proxies team. Prices are read from the live catalog at build time.
- [1]Apple Developer: Ratings, reviews, and responses
- [2]Apple Developer: Manage availability for your app on the App Store
- [3]Apple Developer: App Store Connect API: List all customer reviews for an app
- [4]Android Developers Blog: Making ratings and reviews better for users and developers (August 2021)
- [5]Google for Developers: Google Play Developer API: Reply to Reviews
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