Review sources

How to show App Store and Google Play reviews on your website

8 September 2026 · JustReview

App Store and Google Play reviews can be shown on your own website the same way any other public review source can: a widget reads the store listing, imports the review text and star rating, and renders it as HTML on your domain. The part nobody tells you is what that feed looks like once it arrives. Store reviews are longer, angrier and older than the Google reviews most websites display, and in our own database they are also the source almost nobody connects.

All numbers below come from our production database, checked on 8 September 2026.

Almost nobody connects their app reviews

We support App Store and Google Play as review sources, and we can see exactly how many of the websites we host actually use them. The answer is a rounding error:

Five App Store connections and one Google Play connection, against 3,688 for Google. Every source we support has fewer connections than Google, that is expected, but app stores are at the very bottom of the list, below sources that serve one country or one narrow trade.

The obvious reading is that app publishers treat the store listing as the place where the decision happens and the website as a signpost pointing at it. That reading is not wrong, but it has a consequence worth naming: if a visitor lands on your marketing site from a search or an ad, the social proof that would convince them is one tap away on a different domain, behind a store page that will also show them your competitors in the “You Might Also Like” row. Putting the review text on your own page is the only version of that where the visitor never leaves.

Only three of those five connections ever produced anything

Connection count flatters the source. Of the five App Store connections we hold, three have any reviews attached at all, and between them they account for exactly 40 reviews. The single Google Play connection has imported zero reviews to date.

Thirty-six of forty reviews are more than three years old. One account holds 35 of the 40, and its most recent review is dated March 2023. That is not an import failure, it is what an app’s review history looks like when the app stopped being actively promoted: the store listing keeps the old reviews forever, and the flow of new ones tracks download volume, which for most apps is spiky rather than steady. A shop’s Google reviews trickle in from ordinary foot traffic; an app’s store reviews arrive in bursts around a launch or an update and then stop.

If you connect an app store source expecting a steadily growing wall of testimonials, this is the expectation to correct before you promise it to anyone. What you are connecting is an archive, and whether it grows depends on whether the app is still being installed.

The reviews themselves are a completely different animal

This is the finding that should change how you plan the page, and it is the one we have not seen anyone else publish. We ran the same profile query over our App Store reviews and over every Google review imported in August 2026:

Two things fall out of that table. The first is that store reviews are far harsher. Fewer than a third are five stars, and one in seven is a one-star review, against roughly one in thirty-one on Google. People leave an app review when the app did something to them, good or bad, and “bad” is disproportionately what gets someone to open a keyboard.

The second is that store reviews are far more complete. Not one of the 40 App Store reviews we hold is a bare star rating: every single one carries written text, and the average is 278 characters, about 45% longer than the Google average in the same database. Google’s own feed, by contrast, is 21.6% star-only, so a fifth of it renders as a rating with nothing to read.

For a website, that combination is genuinely unusual: high-quality prose, low average rating. It means an app-store feed is excellent raw material and terrible wallpaper. Dropped unfiltered into a hero section it will read as a complaints board. Curated, it gives you the specific, concrete, long-form testimonials that Google reviews almost never produce, because nobody types 278 characters about a shop they visited once.

The practical shape that follows: use a testimonials-style widget with review-level control rather than an average-rating badge, and choose which reviews appear instead of streaming everything. That is also the honest version. A summary badge showing an app’s real store average, in a category where the median rating is dragged down by people who could not get past the login screen, is a worse advert than five well-chosen paragraphs from people who actually use the thing.

The bug that made this source look broken for four years

There is a second reason app store reviews are rare in our data, and it is our own fault rather than the market’s.

Until July 2026, the list of valid source names lived in four separate copies in our codebase. Two of them wrote the App Store source name with a hyphen, apps-apple.com, while the frontend and the database used a dot, apps.apple.com. The two spellings never matched. Reviews imported fine and sat in the database, but they did not count towards plan limits and did not appear in the dashboard aggregates, so an account could import App Store reviews and see zero everywhere it looked.

Google Play had a worse version of the same problem. The rule that recognised a google.com URL also matched play.google.com, because it tested for the string rather than the host, so a Google Play connection was filed under Google Shopping instead. Our best reconstruction is that this is why Google Play was marked as non-working and commented out of the connector menu back in 2022, and stayed commented out for four years. The connector was fine. The name it was saved under was not.

We consolidated all four copies into one normaliser on 25 July 2026, which is also when we found out how much the older whitelists had been hiding: 75,000 reviews stored under historical source names across 20 accounts that were seeing zero. If you have ever wondered why a review source shows a count in one screen and nothing in another, this class of bug, a name mismatch rather than a failed import, is a likelier explanation than anything going wrong on the network.

We are publishing it because it is the answer to a question we could not otherwise answer honestly. “Why do only five accounts connect the App Store?” has at least two causes, and one of them is that for part of that period, doing so produced a screen full of zeroes.

How to set it up

Nothing about the setup is exotic. You paste the public URL of your app’s store listing, we crawl the listing on the same daily schedule as every other source, and the reviews land in the same place as your Google and Facebook ones. From there the widget snippet goes on your page like any other, one script tag and one container div, no plugin required.

Two decisions are worth making deliberately:

1. Pick the widget by what the feed looks like, not by what the page needs visually. For a feed that is 15% one-star, a curated testimonials layout beats an average-rating badge.
2. Decide whether you are showing one store or both. iOS and Android reviews for the same app are separate listings with separate review sets, so App Store and Google Play connect independently, and you can show them together in one widget or keep them apart.

Our current plans list which tier covers these sources alongside the rest, and you can create a free account and connect Google or Facebook first, both available at no cost, to see how the widget behaves before deciding whether to add your store listings to it.

The honest summary

App store reviews are the least-used source we host and, per review, some of the best written: zero star-only entries, 278 characters on average, and a set of concrete complaints and compliments that no Google review ever matches for detail. They are also harsh, mostly old, and dependent on install volume you may no longer have. Connect them for the text, not for the average, curate what you show, and check what is actually in the feed before you build a page around it. If you want the wider comparison of which sources still produce anything at all, we measured that across every source we support, and the marketplace equivalent covers the same question for sellers rather than app publishers.