Android Play Store: Reviews autoreply

Automatically reply to Google Play Store user reviews using the Publisher API and OAuth2.

The script is intended to run as a cronjob. On each run, it will check the latest 50 reviews and reply a canned response (from replyToReview method, universalCannedResponse variable ) to every review that has fewer than 5 stars.

Installation

The script is a python2 file.

1. Download Google APIs Client Library for Python (google-api-python-client): https://code.google.com/p/google-api-python-client/

or use pip:

$ pip install google-api-python-client

You may need to use pip2 instead of pip.

2. Make sure you can import the client library:

$ python
>>> import apiclient
>>>

You may need to use python2 instead of python

First request using OAuth2: Installed application

1. Edit the client_secrets.json file and add the client ID and client secret.

2. Execute any of the scripts to begin the auth flow:

$ python basic_list_apks.py com.myapp.package

A browser window will open and ask you to login. Make sure the account has enough permissions in the Google Play Developer console.

3. Accept the permissions dialog. The browser should display

The authentication flow has completed.

Close the window and go back to the shell.

4. The script will output a list of apks.

5. The tokens will be stored in androidpublisher.dat. Remove this file to restart the auth flow.

Running as a cronjob

SSH to your server and crontab -e to edit the crontab.

Before running the script for the first time, you need to go through the auth routine, which is a bit more complicated when running from a cronjob.

Add the following entry to get cron environment variables into a file:

* * * * * export -p > ~/cron-env

and let it run once. Then remove the line. You should now have a cron-env file in your home directory. You can then run:

cd && env -i sh -c '. ./cron-env; exec bash'

Now you are in a cron environment shell. Run the reply-to-reviews.py script and go through the auth flow. After that, your script cronjob will work. Let's add it:

Sample crontab entry would be:

*/5 * * * * /usr/bin/python2 /home/username/reply-to-reviews/reply_to_reviews.py com.package.name >> /home/username/reply-to-reviews.log

This will run the script every 5 minutes and also log to a logfile, which you can check using tailf /home/username/reply-to-reviews.log.