Google Play Store is a store where you can find and download a wide range of apps and games. There are millions of games and apps available for you to download and use in the Play Store.
If you need to extract data such as app reviews, installs, and ratings from Google Play Store, you will need a scraper that can access Google Play Store and extract all the necessary information.
In this post, we will show you how to scrape data from Google Play Store and extract details about any application or game available in Google Play Store.
Can I Scrape Google Play
You can scrape Google Play Store to extract the app’s name, reviews, ratings, number of downloads, developer, and other information available there. You can scrape the app data using Google Play Store API. However, there is a daily limit of 200,000 requests, and if you need to scrape the reviews, there is a limit of 60 requests per hour. So, if there is a large amount of data to scrape, using the API might not be feasible.
You can also use Python codes available on Github for scraping the app details from Google Play Store. These scripts do not have any limit on the number of requests or data scraped, so these scripts can be the best if you need to extract a huge amount of data.
You can also use the Python library, such as beautiful soup, to scrape the data. The full step-by-step guide to scraping Google Play Store using Python and Beautiful Soup is available here.
However, writing Python code is complicated if you have no experience in programming. So, if you don’t want to get into coding, you can follow the steps below to easily scrape app details from Google Play Store.
Easy Steps to Scrape Google Play Store Without Coding
If you are not into coding, then you can try the best web scraping tool – Octoparse can be one of the easiest methods to scrape the details from Google Play Store. Octoparse is a web scraping tool that enables users to scrape and extract data from websites in a structured format. It provides the auto-detecting mode and preset templates so that you can scrape data within a few clicks. You can also find advanced functions like IP proxy, IP rotation, scheduled tasks, etc. Just download and install it on your Windows/Mac device and follow the steps below to have a free trial.
Step 1: Enter the URL copied from Google Play
Copy the URL you need to scrape from Google Play, and paste it into the search box of Octoparse. Click on the Start button to auto-detect data.
Step 2: Customize a workflow for Google Play page
Once all the relevant data is detected by the autodetect, you can see the data in the Data Preview section in Octoparse. Check the data and remove any unwanted fields and rename the fields as required. Then, click on the Create Workflow button to create a crawler for extracting data from Google Play.
Step 3: Scrape and export Google Play data
After all the changes are saved, click on the Run button to start scraping. You can export the scraped data in Excel files or save them to the database.
If you still have questions about the steps, read more details from Octoparse Google Play Scraping Tutorial.
Octoparse also provides a ready-made task template for scraping Google Play Store. With these task templates, you can easily scrape the app reviews of any app or game. All you have to do is enter the app URL and the number of times you click the “load more” button. Then you can run the scraper and it will start getting reviews of the app in the Play Store along with the name of the reviewer and star rating.
Final Words
Scraping Google Play store app reviews is not that hard if you use tools like Octoparse. By following these four simple steps, you can easily scrape Google Play app reviews to extract application data and reviews without touching any code. You can just create an Octoparse task or use the pre-made template and run it, and it will start collecting the reviews and other details of the app from Google Play.
