Any way to read international App Store reviews?

Question

Note: This question IS programming related! It's all about better code and better software concepts through reading what customers say! So please don't close this, as it's important for my (and probably also your) software projects.

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In order to write great software, it is essential to read reviews of apps from competitors. That way, you can see what they did wrong and improve on it.

BUT: Apple jails every country into it's own tiny bubble. It's almost impossible to read reviews of users from outside your country. Sometimes, when I'm lucky, Google does return an iTunes website with an app in english and I can read english reviews from people in the US. But most of the times, I end up beeing redirected to iTunes or the App Store app, launching my tiny and insignificant German bubble of some few reviews.

It's ridiculous that these days where the world should be open to everyone, someone like Apple restricts the people to their own countries.

Does anyone have a good advice how to break out from this jail of artificial content witholding? I don't live in China, so I don't want to be threated like if I would. I want to read your US reviews, your French reviews, and even your Pakistani reviews.

I want to make better apps, but I can't if 95% of worldwide reviews are hidden from me as an developer.

Answer 1

At the bottom right of the iTunes web site, there's an round button with the flag of your country. With that button, you can switch the country. I don't know if you can switch to any country.

There's a similar functionality in the iTunes application.

That's the best approach I know. I'd be glad if there was something more useful and less cumbersome.

Answer 2

Have a look at AppReviewsFinder - small but handy Java application for grabbing customer reviews and ratings from app stores.