Last week a colleague mentioned his iOS app reviews disappear from view after set period of time. While that’s not the case over on the Android platform, it got me thinking so I hacked together a little python script to export all the app reviews for any given android app. Using the simple requests library, it generates a json dump in the format [{'rating':"5.0", "title":"App review", "review":"bla bla bla", "author":"Joe Bloggs", "device":"Samsung Ace", "date":1 September 2012"},...]

Once its represented as json it becomes very easy to re-purpose. I’ve used it to generate tag clouds (thanks to www.wordle.net). E.g.

It might well be useful to others I’m posting it here.

Use it with a package name. e.g.
python get_reviews.py uk.ac.bris.ilrt.planttracker

Warning: This script scrapes the reviews from the public-facing play store rather then using a specific API. This means it needs to strip out all the html which in turn means that it’s likely to break if Google changes their html format. So you have been warned.