automations / GitHub Actions · updated 2026-07-20

Google Play reviews → git history (GitHub Actions)

Git-scraping for app reviews: every day the workflow pulls an app's newest reviews and commits them to your repository as a dated JSON file — a diffable, greppable review history with no database to run. Failed lookups are typed $0 rows.

Get the workflow on GitHub Google Play Reviews Scraper docs

100 newest reviews per day cost $0.008 — about $0.24 per month per app.

What's inside

  1. 1.Checkout (the workflow commits into your repository)
  2. 2.Fetch the newest reviews (curl → run-sync-get-dataset-items, sort: newest, saved as data/play-reviews/<app>/<date>.json)
  3. 3.Summarize (delivered vs failure-row counts in the job summary)
  4. 4.Commit the snapshot (one dated file per day; a rerun on the same date with identical data is skipped; declares contents: write and serializes runs via a concurrency group)

Set it up

Copy the file from GitHub (button above) into your repository's .github/workflows/ directory, then add an APIFY_TOKEN repository secret (Settings → Secrets and variables → Actions). Copy the file into .github/workflows/, add an APIFY_TOKEN repository secret, and set APP_ID in the env block. Runs daily at 06:00 UTC (edit the cron), or fire it manually from the Actions tab. The token comes from Apify Console → Settings → API tokens; the free tier works, and the run bills per delivered row on your Apify account.

Ways to extend it

  • Watch several apps by turning APP_ID into a job matrix, one snapshot folder each.
  • Alert on regressions: a jq step that opens a GitHub issue when today's file contains new 1-star reviews.
  • Diff snapshots in a weekly job to report review-velocity and rating drift from your own git history.

Going deeper: the Python/pandas export guide for working with the same review rows. Actor pricing: what a Google Play Reviews Scraper run costs. Error codes the failure branch can carry: the error-code reference.