Why is scraping large amounts of Google Play Store reviews so challenging?

Yeah, you’ve hit the nail on the head there. Most scrapers are fine, but Google starts limiting you hard after about 10k reviews. They often give you duplicate pagination tokens, which is why your CSV ends up with duplicates. I’ve been there too! I switched to Proxyon for residential rotation, and it works like a charm for big jobs. Plus, if you don’t want a full subscription, they have pay-as-you-go options that's perfect for one-off scrapes.

You're right, scraping at that scale can really be a hassle. There does seem to be a market for more capable scraping solutions, but the truth is that you often need a bot network for the serious jobs because Google's defenses are quite strong. I once spoke to a developer behind a project called Scrapoxy, and he explained that it's a lot of work to avoid getting detected. It’s unfortunate that the project's now defunct. Sometimes the value of the data just doesn't justify the effort.

Absolutely, once you start going for large volumes, you run into a whole different set of challenges like rate limits and blocks. I switched to using Qoest Proxy because it handles the proxy rotation and anti-blocking for you, which saves a ton of headaches. Now, I can just focus on retrieving the data I need without worrying about getting blocked.