Updated Oct 2026

Google Play reviews API only returns 7 days: how to get the history

The first surprise for anyone building on the Google Play Developer API is the small number of reviews it returns. It is not a bug and not a quota: the reviews resource only returns reviews created or modified in the last 7 days, and only those with a comment. If your sync job misses a week, those reviews are gone from the API. This guide explains where the rest of the reviews are, how to merge the two sources, and how Prisma does it for you.

What the API gives you and what it leaves out

GET https://www.googleapis.com/androidpublisher/v3/applications/{packageName}/reviews returns:

• reviews with a text comment, created or modified in the last week,
• 10 per page by default, up to 100 with maxResults, with a nextPageToken for the next page,
• optionally translated with translationLanguage, keeping the original in originalText.

It leaves out:

• Everything older than 7 days. A review from last month is not in the API even if nobody has replied to it.
• Star-only ratings. The API returns reviews with comments only, so the average you compute from it will not match the rating on the store page.
• Alpha and beta feedback. Production reviews only.

The quotas make it worse: 200 reads per hour per app means you cannot simply poll faster to avoid gaps across many apps.

Where the full history is: Play Console review reports

Google Play publishes monthly review reports for each app. You can download them in Play Console under Download reports → Reviews, one CSV per app and month, and the same files sit in the Google Cloud Storage bucket of your developer account (the bucket id is shown on that reports page), so a service account with access to the bucket can fetch them programmatically.

Each row has the review text, star rating, device and app version, the reviewer’s language, the submission date and the developer reply with its date, in UTF-16 CSV. The report for the current month updates daily, so there is a lag of up to a day between a review appearing on the store and its row in the report.

How to merge both into one feed

1. Backfill from the reports: download every monthly CSV for the app, parse it (UTF-16, tab-separated in the raw export), and insert every review keyed by its review id and submission time.
2. Poll the API for the last 7 days, every 15 to 60 minutes depending on your quota, and upsert by review id. The API sees new reviews within minutes; the report only the next day.
3. Re-read the current month’s report daily to pick up star-only ratings and any review the API missed while you were over quota.
4. Treat replies as a queue: POST .../reviews/{reviewId}:reply is limited to 350 characters and 2,000 replies per app per day.

It is a few hundred lines of code, two credentials (the Play Developer API and the storage bucket) and one more scheduler to monitor. It is also exactly what Prisma does on your behalf.

How Prisma handles it

Connect the app once by inviting Prisma’s service account in Play Console with two permissions (view app information, reply to reviews). Prisma then:

• reads new reviews from the API as they appear,
• backfills the full history from the monthly reports,
• merges both into one feed, de-duplicated by review id, in the same JSON as the App Store, Google and every other platform,
• keeps every review from the day you connect, so the 7-day window never matters again,
• publishes the reply you send through the official API and tells you with a reply.published webhook.

curl "https://api.prismareviews.com/v1/reviews?platform=google_play&since=2025-01-01" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $PRISMA_API_KEY"

The connection request, quotas and the reply rules are on the Google Play reviews API page. Google Play is in the free Spark plan: each app counts as one location.

FAQ

Why does the Google Play reviews API return so few reviews?

By design it returns only reviews created or modified in the last 7 days, and only those with a comment. Star-only ratings and older reviews are not in the API.

Where can I get all Google Play reviews?

From the review reports in Play Console (Download reports → Reviews): monthly CSV files per app, also available in the Google Cloud Storage bucket of your developer account. Merge them with the API’s last 7 days to get a complete feed.

Does Prisma keep Google Play review history?

Yes. Prisma reads new reviews from the API and the full history from Google Play’s monthly reports, merges both into one feed and keeps every review from the day you connect.