I spent an afternoon last year fighting a headless Chrome that scraped Play Store reviews. CAPTCHA, then a proxy bill, then a week later the DOM shifted and the whole thing returned empty arrays. Threw it out.
Turns out I never needed the browser. Both Google Play and the Apple App Store serve reviews as plain JSON you can hit with an HTTP request. No login, no proxies, no Playwright. This is the request shapes, the pagination caps that aren't in any docs, and the one place Google's format bit me.
All Node.js, all on got-scraping — a drop-in got replacement that copies a real browser's TLS and header fingerprint. That fingerprint earns its keep. The identical request from stock axios or fetch would sometimes come back 403 while got-scraping walked right through, because Play is fingerprinting the TLS handshake, not reading your User-Agent.
Apple first, because Apple made it easy
Apple publishes reviews as an RSS feed in JSON. One endpoint:
