RSS Feed For Apple App Reviews

Question

I am looking for some advice on how to go about getting reviews for apps on the app store. I have been using this Previous Answer for a reference

At the minute I am testing the system using the following url (Instagram):

https://itunes.apple.com/us/rss/customerreviews/id=389801252/json

Problem is that sometimes it produces reviews and other times it doesn't. Does anyone have any idea why this may be, I don't think I am being rate limited because I can use other ids and the results are being fetched fine.

Any suggestions or advice on an alternative method would be great.

I am developing a tool so I could really do with consistent results.

Thanks

Answer 1

I experienced this behaviour also. It feels as if Apple's server decides whether to send reviews by rolling dice. That said, I think you can increase chances to be accepted by adhere to the following points:

• Include a 'page' parameter, even if you request the first page. (...customerreviews/page=1/...)
• Include a 'sortBy' parameter (...id=12345/sortBy=mostRecent/json)
• Request XML instead of JSON (...id=12345/xml)
• When requesting the second or any other page up to 10th, make sure you take the url as provided in the <link rel="next" href="..."> tag

The server will still occasionally send empty feeds. I will file a radar on this soon.