Way back when the iPhone OS 2.0 was announced and the SDK released, we worked on our very first iPhone App: Divine Office. It is a niche app that allows Christians to listen and pray an audio version of the Liturgy of the Hours.
What we really missed at the time was the ability to quickly post-process and analyze Apple’s cryptic reports to understand how the sales were going. Apple is not providing simple data you need, like… totals. In any given moment, to find out how many units you are actually selling, you need to go through a custom spreadsheet or a database in order to get some real data out of it, and even that way, there’s a lot of complexity to be taken care of: multiple currencies, free updates, refunds, etc.
We envisioned a web app named “App Tracker” that would basically be Google Analytics for iPhone Apps Sales, but we never managed to have spare resources to assign to the project and finally the community caught up with an impressive line up of products to serve the purpose. Here is a quick list.
AppViz – a Mac OS X app that automatically downloads your iTunes reports and makes charts and graphs for you.
AppSales Mobile – Similar to AppViz, but its for your iPhone. It has one big drawback, it is oriented around revenue from paid apps. It will show download number for free apps mixed in with the overall report data, but it doesn’t include downloads in the line graphs, they are revenue only.
My App Sales – is another sales stats checker for your iPhone, but unlike AppSales it reports and charts both free and paid apps.
Heartbeat – a fully featured subscription website that features everything in all the tools above mixed with crash reporting, analytics, and a whole lot more.
AppStatz – another online, still in private beta.
AppStore Sales – a Mac app that helps tracking sales of your applications and tracking ranks of applications in AppStore tops.
AppFigures – a full web app that also features a free plan. The paid plan is very affordable. Here is a list of the main features: Interactive Sales & Download Reports in your currency, Automatic Daily Report Importing from iTunes Connect, Receive Sales Reports by Email, pp Rank Trending in Major App Stores – Updated Hourly, Read Reviews from All 77 App Stores World-wide in your language.
AppFigures has been my choice. I found it to be straightforward and fast to use. A giant leap from my spreadsheets. It is not yet bug free but the support is very responsive and solved my issue within a few hours.
I will also look closer at Heartbeat in the future. All other apps are less mature or less complete, and AppFigures e-mail reports make the iPhone apps not worth the effort to me (just my opinion).
Some additional tools you should check out:
MajicRank and AppRanking – These tools scan iTunes servers and figure out apps ranking in iTunes stores around the world. As well as top 100 free and top 100 paid, the app stores have top 100 free and paid for each app category.
Mobclix – they show app rankings on their site, with graphs. They are charting top 100 popularity free and paid combined, for the USA app store only.
If I missed any app or tool that is worth mentioning, please post a comment! ;)