Google Play Apps Scraper

Google Play Apps Scraper: app listings by keyword, category or package id

Give it search terms, Android package ids, Play links or a store category, and get one row per app: title, developer, rating, ratings count, price, in-app purchase range, install band, content rating, version, last update, icon and screenshots. No Google account and no API key.

Two things to know before you start. Install counts are Google's own band, so you get 1,000,000+ and never an exact figure, though realInstalls carries Play's closer estimate where it publishes one. And a search term reads the first page of results, which is roughly the screenful a person sees, not the whole catalogue.

🔍 What Google Play Apps Scraper does

Three ways in, and you can mix them in one run.

Search terms work the way the store's own search box does. Type budget tracker and you get the apps Play puts in front of somebody who typed that.

Package ids or Play links go straight to the listing. com.whatsapp and https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.whatsapp both work, in the same list.

A store category returns what Play features on that category page: its top free, top grossing, top paid and trending shelves, in Play's own order.

Whichever way you came in, every app is then read from its own listing, so the row is the same shape each time. Package ids are fetched first and the rest of your row budget is split evenly between the search terms and the category, so five terms and 50 rows gives ten of each rather than fifty of the first.

📥 What you give it

{
  "searchTerms": ["budget tracker"],
  "appIds": ["com.whatsapp"],
  "country": "us",
  "language": "en",
  "maxItems": 50
}

One storefront per run. country is a single code, so comparing prices across five markets means five runs, one per market.

An unrecognised category is dropped rather than refused. Alongside search terms or package ids you get a BAD_INPUT notice and the rest of the run still happens. On its own, the run has nothing left to do and returns the free sample row, which is easy to misread as a failure.

📤 What you get back

A real row from a recent run, with the long text and links trimmed:

{
  "ok": true,
  "recordType": "app",
  "query": "budget tracker",
  "searchType": "search",
  "appId": "com.thebudgetingapp.thebudgetingapp",
  "url": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.thebudgetingapp...",
  "title": "Budgeting App - Spend Tracker",
  "summary": "Budget planner and expense tracker to help manage your personal finance.",
  "description": "The Budgeting App is a simple and easy-to-use budget planner and daily expense tracker designed to simplify your personal finance...",
  "descriptionHtml": "The Budgeting App is a simple and easy-to-use budget planner and daily expense tracker...",
  "developer": "The Budgeting App",
  "developerId": "4918164273133767251",
  "developerUrl": "https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=4918164273133767251",
  "developerLegalName": "THE BUDGETING COMPANY LIMITED",
  "developerEmail": "[email protected]",
  "developerWebsite": "https://thebudgeting.app",
  "developerAddress": "Suite 15021, Level 1, 6 Johnsonville Road\nJohnsonville 6037\nNew Zealand",
  "privacyPolicy": "https://thebudgeting.app/privacy-policy",
  "genre": "Finance",
  "genreId": "FINANCE",
  "score": 4.71,
  "scoreText": "4.7",
  "ratings": 4207,
  "reviews": 100,
  "histogram": { "1": 167, "2": 0, "3": 83, "4": 377, "5": 3573 },
  "installs": "100,000+",
  "minInstalls": 100000,
  "realInstalls": 226245,
  "price": 0,
  "currency": "USD",
  "priceText": "Free",
  "free": true,
  "offersIAP": true,
  "inAppPurchaseRange": "$2.99 - $89.99 per item",
  "containsAds": false,
  "adsLabel": null,
  "contentRating": "Everyone",
  "contentRatingDescription": null,
  "released": "Aug 13, 2022",
  "releasedAt": "2022-08-14T04:31:42.000Z",
  "updated": "2026-09-11T07:25:11.000Z",
  "updatedText": "Sep 11, 2026",
  "recentChanges": "- Budget home screen widget\n- Tracker insights - see when you'll get there...",
  "version": "7.2.2",
  "androidVersion": "11",
  "androidMinSdk": 36,
  "icon": "https://play-lh.googleusercontent.com/yIlsuOo3M2rthxd8QputTbLqQVqW0nMa...",
  "headerImage": "https://play-lh.googleusercontent.com/BESOXa68gKo6WUQAPsCa-gFs24X18cy0...",
  "screenshots": ["https://play-lh.googleusercontent.com/fduMeD1CdniW-mRkz76TN3iC5Xtl..."],
  "video": null,
  "topChartRank": null,
  "available": true,
  "country": "us",
  "language": "en",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-09-21T01:23:09.777Z"
}

🧾 Reading the output

Three kinds of row can land in your dataset.

Filter on _sample and _diagnostic, not on recordType. The free sample row also carries recordType: "app", so a filter on that alone keeps it.

▶️ How to run it

1. Open Google Play Apps Scraper and click Try for free. 2. Put your terms into Search terms, or package ids into App IDs or Play links. Delete the examples first. 3. Set Country to the storefront you care about, and Maximum rows. Start around 20. 4. Click Start. 5. Download the dataset as JSON, CSV or Excel, or read it from the Apify API.

💰 How much does it cost?

$0.25 per 1,000 apps. Flat on every Apify plan, no volume tiers.

One row is one app. An app that turns up under two of your search terms is fetched and counted once. Sample rows, diagnostic rows, a term that matches nothing and a package id that does not exist are all free.

💡 What people use it for

• Watching a category shelf week by week to see which apps climb and which drop off.
• Pulling the twenty apps that answer a search term, then reading their ratings, install bands and

in-app purchase ranges side by side before building something in that space.

• Checking how an app is priced across markets by running the same package id per country.
• Tracking a competitor's release notes and version numbers with a scheduled run on its package id.
• Collecting icons, screenshots and store text for a competitive teardown.

🚧 What it does not do

• No reviews. Ratings, the count and the star histogram are here, but review text is a different

actor, linked below.

• Install counts are a band. 1,000,000+ is what Play publishes. realInstalls is its own

estimate and is not an exact number either.

• A search reads one page per term, so it is the front of the results, not everything Play would

ever show for it.

• A category returns the featured shelves, which is what that page shows, not every app filed

under it.

• One storefront per run. Five markets means five runs.
• version is null for apps that vary by device, because the listing says so rather than

giving a number.

• Rows are a snapshot. Ratings, prices and rankings move daily, and scrapedAt records when the

row was read.

• Developer fields are whatever the developer filled in. An email or a website can be missing or

stale, and the address is free text.

🧭 Which app scraper do you need?

❓ Questions people ask

Do I need a Google account or a Play API key? No. Nothing to sign up for and no quota.

Can I get the exact install count? No, and nobody can. Play publishes a band. realInstalls is the closest number it gives out.

Why did a package id return nothing? Usually it is not published in the country you asked for. You get a NOT_FOUND row saying so, and it costs nothing.

How many apps does one search term return? Whatever fits on Play's first page of results for it, capped by your share of maxItems.

Can I run it on a schedule? Yes. appId is stable, so diffing runs on it shows what changed in rating, price or version.

Is this legal? These are public store listings. Apify's write-up on scraping and the law is a good starting point, and we are not lawyers.

🆘 If something breaks

Open the Issues tab on the actor page. Send the term or package id and the run ID. The errorCode and details on the diagnostic row usually name the problem on their own.