How much review history you get
Your store dashboard says you have thousands of reviews. ReviewBox imported a few hundred. Nothing is broken — this page explains exactly where the rest are, and why no tool in this category can reach them either.
The short answer
When you connect an app, ReviewBox imports every review the store is willing to hand over at that moment. From then on we capture every new review as it arrives.
How many that first import contains is a property of your app and your store, not of ReviewBox. One app returns 12 reviews, another returns 500. We deliberately never quote a number in advance, because it isn’t ours to promise.
The two numbers on your dashboard measure different things. The large one is the store’s lifetime rating count, read from your public listing. The “synced” figure below it is what we actually hold and can search, tag, and reply to.
Google Play
Google’s Play Developer API returns only recent reviews — roughly the last week. This is not a quota we can raise or a setting we can change: the API has no way to express the request. The call that lists reviews accepts a page size, a package name, a page offset, a page token, and a translation language. There is no date parameter and no “from the beginning” option.
We also page through it up to ten times, so ReviewBox would accept a thousand reviews if Google offered them. It doesn’t. We aren’t asking wrongly — there is no other way to ask.
You can verify this yourself
Every review tool sits behind the same API. Run the same app through a competitor and you will see a number in the same range as ours, not the thousands your Play Console reports. We checked one head-to-head on an app with 2,064 rated reviews: AppFollow returned 272, ReviewBox 202. Same wall, same side of it.
One thing that is in your control: Google Play ratings are published per country. If ReviewBox is reading the wrong storefront you will see a rating and a review count that look nothing like your own. Set the right one under Settings → Apps → Store country.
The App Store
Apple is more generous than Google here. App Store Connect returns customer reviews newest-first with real pagination, so the history goes back further than a week.
ReviewBox currently imports the most recent 200 per sync, and every sync adds whatever is new since the last one — so an established App Store app builds up past that 200 over time. To be straight about it: on iOS that ceiling is ours, not Apple’s, and raising it is on our list. On Android the ceiling is Google’s and no list will move it.
What we do guarantee
We can’t give you back the reviews Google never handed over. We can make sure you never lose another one.
- Every review that arrives after you connect is captured and kept
- Replies you post through ReviewBox are stored alongside them
- Your archive is exportable to CSV at any time, from Reports
- Disconnecting an app doesn’t erase the reviews already captured
The practical consequence: the sooner an app is connected, the more history you end up with. An app connected today has a complete record from today onward.
Where the complete history does exist
Google publishes your full review history in exactly one place: Play Console → Download reports → Reviews. It is a set of monthly CSV files in a Cloud Storage bucket that belongs to you. It is not part of the API, which is why no review tool imports it automatically.
If you need the whole archive today, that export is the way to get it. If you’d find it useful inside ReviewBox, tell us — we can read those files with your permission, and demand decides whether we build it.
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