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I am looking for some advice on how to go about getting reviews for apps on the app store. I have been using this Previous Answer for a reference

At the minute I am testing the system using the following url (Instagram):

https://itunes.apple.com/us/rss/customerreviews/id=389801252/json

Problem is that sometimes it produces reviews and other times it doesn't. Does anyone have any idea why this may be, I don't think I am being rate limited because I can use other ids and the results are being fetched fine.

Any suggestions or advice on an alternative method would be great.

I am developing a tool so I could really do with consistent results.

Thanks

Community
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ORStudios
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2 Answers2

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I experienced this behaviour also. It feels as if Apple's server decides whether to send reviews by rolling dice. That said, I think you can increase chances to be accepted by adhere to the following points:

  • Include a 'page' parameter, even if you request the first page. (...customerreviews/page=1/...)
  • Include a 'sortBy' parameter (...id=12345/sortBy=mostRecent/json)
  • Request XML instead of JSON (...id=12345/xml)
  • When requesting the second or any other page up to 10th, make sure you take the url as provided in the <link rel="next" href="..."> tag

The server will still occasionally send empty feeds. I will file a radar on this soon.

C. S. Hammersmith
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  • This is really frustrating that Apple's service would be so unreliable, but I can confirm that your first 2 suggestions did improve reliability somewhat. – Aaron Aug 03 '15 at 22:29
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The feeds are definitely rate limited. Source: I developed a Mac app for tracking reviews from all app stores (Review Command). My app checks about once every 5 minutes with no problems, but once you start checking multiple countries per second, you get rate limited pretty fast. They will also ban IPs for 24 hours or so for abuse.

jvnbt
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    Have you got any document link about the limitation? or you are advertising your app? Stackoverflow is not for that purpose. please do not mess with it. – Kyle KIM Dec 19 '16 at 17:21