Find a Google Play app's competitors and similar apps, with installs: $0.30 per 1,000 apps

By Keencrest · 2026-11-01

To size up an app's market, you want two lists: the apps Google Play shows as similar to it, and the other apps its developer publishes, each with install bracket, rating and category. Opening store pages one at a time does not scale past a handful of apps. This guide shows how to pull both lists as a table through an API that charges per app record, with a real run.

Price

Job	Cost
1 app record	$0.0003
1,000 app records	$0.30
Competitor sweep: 20 seed apps with up to 50 similar apps each	up to $0.30

The price is per app returned and is the same whether you ask for the card fields or full details. Apps that do not exist in the chosen country are skipped and not charged. There is no start fee and no monthly plan; the Apify free plan includes monthly credit, and a maximum spend per run stops the Actor when it is reached.

A real run

On 2 November 2026 we ran it on Apify's servers with one seed app and one developer name, chosen only because both are well known. The input:

{"similarAppIds": ["org.wikipedia"], "developerIds": ["Wikimedia Foundation"], "maxItems": 5, "includeDetails": false}

The run (id WrLcDkclwfQKgP7tB) returned 6 app records and charged 6 apps, $0.0018. Selected fields of each row:

Title	App ID	Developer	Category	Installs	Rating	Found by
Mimo: Learn Python Coding & AI	`com.getmimo`	Mimo: Learn to Code	Education	10,000,000+	4.66	similar to org.wikipedia
Wikipedia Beta	`org.wikipedia.beta`	Wikimedia Foundation	Books & Reference	1,000,000+	4.22	similar to org.wikipedia
Vocabulary - Learn words daily	`com.hrd.vocabulary`	Monkey Taps LLC	Education	5,000,000+	4.5	similar to org.wikipedia
Flipboard:Your Social Magazine	`flipboard.app`	Flipboard	News & Magazines	500,000,000+	3.41	similar to org.wikipedia
Medium: Read & Write Stories	`com.medium.reader`	A Medium Corporation	News & Magazines	10,000,000+	4.71	similar to org.wikipedia
Wikimedia Commons	`fr.free.nrw.commons`	Wikimedia Foundation	Photography	100,000+	4.2	developer page

Each row also holds the store URL, price, content rating and country. Two points to read the table correctly. First, installs is the public bracket Google Play shows (such as 500,000,000+), not an exact count; minInstalls gives it as a number you can sort on. Second, "similar apps" are Google Play's own suggestions: they can be a different kind of app that the seed app's users also use, as the education and news apps above show. Treat the list as a map of where attention goes, then filter by category.

The developer lookup returned one app in this run. Another app from the same developer came back under similar apps instead, so use a developer's list as a starting point and not as proof that it is complete.

How to use the result

Run with 3 to 5 of your closest competitors in similarAppIds and maxItems 50.
Export to CSV and count how often each app appears across seeds; apps listed as similar to several of your competitors are the ones to study first.
Sort by minInstalls and rating to find a big but weakly rated space. Re-run monthly to see which apps enter or leave the lists.

Limits to know

It reads public store pages only, with no login. Keyword search on Google Play is not offered, because the store's robots.txt disallows that path.
Similar apps come to about 50 per seed app. Install figures are brackets.
Check the Google Play terms of service for your own use of the data, especially before republishing it.

Try it: Google Play Scraper on Apify. $0.30 per 1,000 apps. The Apify free plan includes monthly credit, so a test run costs nothing out of pocket.

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