Google Play

Status: beta

The Google Play connector is in beta: it is built and working end to end, you can connect it today on any plan, and we are still verifying it against real developer accounts before dropping the label. Its card on the Review sources page carries a Beta pill. If something behaves oddly, tell us — that is exactly what this phase exists to catch.

Two things to know before you connect

These are the two facts that surprise people. Both come from Google's API rather than from ReviewHive, and neither can be worked around.

Google Play only shares the last 7 days

Google's Developer API makes only the most recent seven days of reviews available. That is the contract, not a plan limit.

So there is no history to import. When you connect, you get at most a week of reviews — not the years of history a Google Business Profile connect produces.

What you get instead is an archive. Every review ReviewHive ingests stays here permanently, so from the day you connect your history accumulates and keeps accumulating, including reviews Google itself will no longer serve. That is something Play Console does not give you.

It also means a broken connection loses data. With every other source, a sync that stops for a week simply catches up afterwards. Here, reviews that age past seven days while the connection is broken are gone from Google and were never captured by us — nobody can recover them. ReviewHive watches for this: if a Play source has not synced successfully for 72 hours, we mark it as degraded and email your Owners and Admins. Treat that email as urgent.

Replies are limited to 350 characters

Google rejects a reply longer than roughly 350 characters, and strips any HTML.

The composer counts as you type and will not let you send an over-long reply. AI-generated drafts are written to fit, and the Shorter button aims at the limit rather than just trimming. This applies to Google Play only — replies to your other sources are unaffected.

Connect it

You need the Admin or Owner role in ReviewHive. The wizard has three steps: Connect account, Enter package name, then Done.

1. Go to Review sources, choose Google Play, then Connect.
2. Sign in with the Google account you use for Play Console. You will see a new consent screen even if you have already connected Google Business Profile — those are two separate Google products with two separate permissions, and connecting Play does not change your Business Profile connection in any way.
3. Enter your app's package name. It looks like com.yourcompany.yourapp, and you can copy it from the end of your Play Store URL: in play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.yourcompany.yourapp, it is everything after id=.
4. Optionally give the source a friendlier name, then press Connect app.

There is no app picker because Google's Developer API has no endpoint that lists an account's apps. ReviewHive validates the package name by actually reading reviews for it, so a typo or an app your account cannot see fails here rather than turning into silence.

An app with no reviews yet connects fine. That is the best time to connect, in fact — the archive starts from day one.

What syncs

Reviews arrive with their rating, text, author name and your reply if you have posted one. Where a reviewer wrote a separate title, ReviewHive shows it above the review text.

Reviews are stored in the language they were written in. Google can machine- translate them for us, and we deliberately do not ask it to — a translation stored as the reviewer's own words would put sentences in their mouth, and the AI Analyst would then quote those sentences back to you as evidence.

A Play review is technically a conversation thread. ReviewHive shows the most recent thing the reviewer wrote and the most recent thing you replied, which is what the review looks like on the store.

Syncing

Play sources sync hourly. Seven days of retention leaves ample headroom, and hourly keeps the request volume within Google's quota, which is shared across every ReviewHive customer.

Occasionally a sync is deferred to the next hour when that shared quota is running low. This is normal and self-correcting; nothing is lost, because the next run picks up the same reviews.

Troubleshooting

"We could not read reviews for that package name." Check the package name against your Play Store URL, that the app is published, and that the Google account you signed in with has access to the app in Play Console. All three produce the same message.

"This app is already connected." Another ReviewHive workspace has claimed this package name. One app belongs to one workspace. Disconnect it there first.

You received a "has stopped syncing" email. Reconnect the source as soon as you can. The usual cause is an expired Google authorization, and reconnecting takes about a minute. Reviews left behind while it is broken cannot be recovered later, which is why this email exists at all.

A reply was refused as too long. Google's ceiling is about 350 characters. Use the Shorter refinement, or trim by hand — the counter under the composer shows how far over you are.

My history is missing. Expected. Google only shares seven days. Everything from your connect date onward is here and will stay here.