An app's average rating tells you little about why people leave. Written reviews can reveal a broken login flow, confusing subscription terms or a feature customers keep requesting. A useful research workflow keeps the review text next to its rating, version, date and source, so a product team can check the evidence behind each conclusion.

This guide shows how to collect a small Android and iOS review sample, export it, and normalize the two formats for analysis. The tools below are ours: we build API Vault's Apify Actors. The workflow works with JSON exports and ordinary Python; you do not need a separate AI subscription.

Start with a question and a comparable sample

Pick one app or a short list of competitors. Decide whether you are investigating a recent release, recurring complaints or feature requests. Keep the requested storefront and language consistent where possible, and record the collection date. A storefront selection is not proof of each reviewer's location.

Begin with 100 reviews per app.…