How to Scrape and Analyze Google Play Store Reviews

Google Play Store reviews provide direct insight into how users experience mobile applications in real-world conditions. These reviews often reflect app performance, usability issues, feature expectations, update reactions, and stability problems across different devices and Android versions. Because feedback is frequently tied to specific releases, Google Play reviews are especially valuable for understanding how product changes affect user satisfaction over time.

Kimola enables you to collect and analyze Google Play Store reviews without any technical setup. Whether you want to evaluate a single app or compare multiple applications within the same category, Kimola helps transform unstructured app reviews into structured insights that support product, UX, and growth decisions.

Kimola supports both automatic and manual methods for collecting Google Play Store reviews. This tutorial explains each approach step by step and shows how the collected data can be analyzed within Kimola. By the end of this guide, you will be able to choose the most suitable method for your use case and generate reports based on Google Play Store reviews.

Automatically Scrape Google Play Store Reviews

Automatic scraping allows you to analyze Google Play Store reviews by entering an app page link, without manually collecting reviews or preparing a dataset in advance.

When a Google Play app URL is added, Kimola detects the platform automatically, collects publicly available user reviews, and builds a dataset in the background. The selected analyses are then applied through Kimola’s standard report creation workflow. This method is well suited for quickly analyzing overall user sentiment or comparing multiple apps using a consistent setup.

Step 1: Get the Google Play App Link

Open the Google Play Store page of the app you want to analyze and copy the URL from your browser’s address bar. The link should point directly to the app page rather than a category listing or search results page.

You can analyze reviews from a single app to understand overall user feedback, or include multiple app links to compare user experience, feature satisfaction, or stability issues across different applications.

Step 2: Enter the Link into Kimola

On the Kimola dashboard home page, locate the Create your report area and paste the copied Google Play Store link into the input field. Select Start to continue.

If your analysis includes more than one app, you can select Add Multiple and enter each Google Play Store link on a separate line. After continuing, Kimola validates all submitted links to ensure that they are supported and accessible. Any issues are clearly shown so that incorrect links can be fixed or removed before proceeding.

Once validation is complete, reviews collected from all selected links are combined into a single dataset and prepared for analysis.

Step 3: Select the Report Size

Kimola then prompts you to define how many reviews will be collected and analyzed. Using the slider, you can specify the target dataset size for the report.

When multiple app links are included, the selected dataset size is distributed across all links. If one app contains fewer available reviews than required, the remaining quota is automatically filled using reviews from the other apps. This ensures that the dataset size you selected is reached whenever sufficient data is available, while also helping you manage query usage effectively.

Understanding Google Play Store Review Data

Google Play Store reviews often include short, direct feedback that reflects real usage conditions. Reviews may highlight app crashes, performance issues, feature requests, UI changes, or reactions to recent updates. Star ratings are frequently used alongside written feedback to express overall satisfaction or frustration.

When Google Play Store reviews are collected automatically, Kimola captures all available fields shown on the platform, such as review content, rating, date, and source URL. These fields can later be used to filter insights by rating level, analyze feedback related to specific updates, or track recurring issues across versions.

Manually Scrape Google Play Store Reviews

Manual scraping provides an alternative way to collect Google Play Store reviews when you prefer to gather data through direct interaction with the platform rather than starting from an app link inside Kimola.

This workflow uses Kimola’s browser extension, Airset Generator, to capture reviews while browsing Google Play Store app pages. Reviews collected through the extension are stored as Airsets in your Kimola account.

Airsets allow you to collect reviews first and analyze them later. This approach is useful when reviews are gathered across multiple sessions, from different apps, or over longer periods of time. Instead of running the analysis immediately, you can organize collected reviews as Airsets and decide when to create a report.

Step 1: Open the Google Play Store App Page

Navigate to the Google Play Store page of the app you want to analyze. Scroll to the reviews section so that user reviews are visible on the page.

Since the Airset Generator collects only the reviews currently loaded in the browser, make sure the review list is fully loaded before starting the scraping process.

Step 2: Start Scraping Reviews

Once the reviews are visible, select the Airset Generator icon in your browser toolbar. The extension detects the app name and displays it for confirmation before data collection begins.

Select Generate to start capturing the visible reviews. During the process, the extension may navigate through additional review pages to collect more data. To avoid interruptions, keep the browser tab open until scraping is complete.

Step 3: Complete the Scraping

As scraping continues, the extension moves through available review pages to collect as many reviews as possible. You can stop the process at any time using the control shown in the extension.

When scraping finishes or is stopped manually, the collected reviews are saved as an Airset. The Airset appears in the extension menu along with your recent datasets. When you are signed in to your Kimola account, you can open the Airset directly from the extension to review the data or create a report for analysis.

Step 4: Create a Report from the Airset

To analyze an Airset, open the Kimola dashboard and navigate to Datasets in the left-hand menu, then select Airsets. Locate the relevant dataset and choose Create a Report.

During report setup, select the column that contains the primary review text and optionally include date and URL columns if available. These selections define how the dataset will be structured for analysis.

Analyze Google Play Store Reviews

Whether Google Play Store reviews are collected automatically or manually, they can be analyzed to identify recurring usability issues, sentiment patterns, feature expectations, and user frustrations related to performance or updates.

Kimola applies the same unified report creation workflow across all data collection methods. This ensures that analyses remain consistent regardless of how the reviews were gathered and allows you to focus on configuring the analysis to match your research or product objectives.

Choose Interpretations

Beyond standard sentiment analysis and classifications, Kimola allows you to apply higher-level interpretations to Google Play Store reviews. These interpretations help uncover patterns such as usability pain points, feature adoption signals, update-related feedback, and user expectations over time.

Selected interpretations appear under My List, where they can be reviewed and adjusted before the report is created.

Interpretations do not consume queries from your plan. Instead, they use GPT Credits, which are available as an add-on. GPT Credits do not expire and can be purchased at any time. New accounts receive a limited number of free GPT Credits when they are first created.

Review Report Settings

After completing the interpretation step, Kimola displays the Review screen as the final step before starting the analysis. This screen allows you to review key report settings and make any necessary adjustments.

When a report is created from a single Google Play Store link, the report title is generated automatically based on the source. If the report is created from multiple app links or from an Airset, the report title must be entered manually before continuing.

The Source / Dataset field shows whether the report is based on Google Play Store links or on an Airset. You can also choose the output language for analysis results such as sentiment labels, themes, summaries, and interpretation outputs.

The Required Query section shows how many queries will be used to generate the report and how usage is distributed across data collection and analysis steps. This preview helps you understand how dataset size and selected interpretations affect your plan usage before the report is created.

Create the Report

Select Create Report to start the process. Kimola collects the selected Google Play Store reviews, applies the configured analyses, and generates the report automatically.

Once the report is ready, it appears in the Reports section of the dashboard. From there, you can review the analysis results, organize the report under a Project, or export the outputs for further use.

Reports can be exported in formats such as Excel for deeper analysis, PowerPoint or PDF for presentations, and email for scheduled or on-demand sharing. This flexibility makes it easy to turn Google Play Store review insights into outputs that support product decisions and reporting workflows.

Conclusion

Google Play Store reviews reflect how users experience mobile applications in real usage scenarios, making them a valuable source of insight for product improvement and user experience optimization. Kimola provides flexible and transparent ways to collect and analyze these reviews through both automatic and manual workflows, allowing teams to adapt their approach based on scale, timing, and research goals.

All Google Play Store review data should be collected and analyzed strictly for internal research and decision-making purposes. Review content must not be redistributed, republished, or used in ways that violate Google Play Store policies or applicable copyright regulations. Users are responsible for ensuring compliance with all platform-specific terms.