Working with iTunes Store customer reviews API

Question

I am working with iTunes store's customer reviews API and I have some questions, the general URL is like this:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/rss/customerreviews/id=(APPID)/sortBy=mostRecent/json

I have two questions, the first is I don't want to specify the country, so I remove the country code like this:

// /us/ has been removed from the URL 
https://itunes.apple.com/rss/customerreviews/id=(APPID)/sortBy=mostRecent/json

...but still, the reviews and rates belong to the US store, Is there any possible way to get a summary of rates and reviews worldwide?

Secondly, can I change the result sort defined by sortBy=mostRecent?

My third question is if I develop an app which monitors reviews and rates with Apple's official API, does Apple reject my app for reasons like scraping their website or something like that?

Answer 1

1. Unfortunately, there is no way to get the results for all countries in one go. You have to query each country individually. Here is a list of country codes: https://affiliate.itunes.apple.com/resources/documentation/linking-to-the-itunes-music-store/#CountryCodes

2. There is no publicly documented way of changing the sort order.

3. I'd be surprised if you ran into any problems - after all, you're not scraping their website, but using an API they've exposed for that very purpose. Others have been doing it for a long time, e.g. https://reviewbot.io/ or https://appbot.co/. But there's only one way to find out for sure.

Answer 2

You can't get all countries, only the ones you specify, us is default.

There is a limit, of as far as I know, 50 reviews you can get trough pagination links provided in the las result item.

You can load .../xml or .../json

You can only sort by mostRecent

The first result item is not a review but an app description.

Your last question can only be answered by Apple.