AppFollow — helps to be aware of app activities in Google Play

If you are indie developer creating an app or a game for Google Play, most likely you wish to become very popular and earn millions of dollars after introducing a new breakthrough to mobile world. However, if you’re also smart, you must know that in order to succeed creating a good app is not enough. Since the very beginning you need to keep track of its performance very thoroughly.

Analysing app activity means asking a lot of questions. How users found out about your app? What is app position in search category in different countries? How many installs, launches, sessions and profit (if paid) app delivered? How stable is app performance? Are there any bugs? How users react to technical shortcomings? What should be improved? And this is just a small amount of information you need to know for being competitive in the world of Android devices.

Application dashboard

Most of the answers can be found in Google Play Console or Google Analytics. But data is shown only on request. Meaning that you should open your personal profile to check what’s going on with your app. If you took a day off or caught a cold, it’d be hard to control app activity and important changes can be easily missed. Such info gap can cost a fortune to you or even make you a bankrupt.

It’s worth to notice that Google launched apps for both console and analytics but what if your team is bigger than just yourself. Each member should get access and rights to see the data. And of course there is always one person who claims he or she didn’t have permit to enter analytics just at the most crucial moment. Time is gone, and you better know how fast paced mobile industry is…

Track position by keywords

To solve the issue you can start using one of available analytical tools but again they require access to console, which means you can’t track any app you want. In such tools all data is delivered on a demand basis. You might get daily or weekly email newsletters but it has nothing to do with real-time notifications in team chats or ticket systems. It’s not beneficial for a workflow since nowadays teams are used to get everything instantly and react to changes fast.

There is a solution for all the above — new tracking tool AppFollow.

Slack integration

How does it work?

• Add any apps from Google Play (App Store and Windows Store as well). It can be your own apps, competitor’s apps and just interesting and new app you’d like to track. Access to Google Play Dev Console is not required.
• Choose necessary countries and languages: 1–2 countries, top 15 or the whole world — it’s up to you. Apps can be organised in collections the way you want: based on topic, geo, platforms and anything else you decide.
• Select relevant keywords and check out how users browse for your apps in stores.
• If necessary, set-up integrations with Slack and HipChat or systems like Zendesk and Trello, or just a regular email (notifications and daily/ weekly reports).
• AppFollow collects data about chosen apps and countries automatically.

What exactly you can do:

1. Check rankings and reviews for selected countries (languages).
2. Filter, translate and export user reviews.
3. Tag important reviews with words or phrases (e.g. bug, ui, feature, etc.).
4. Reply to user review with one click or directly from AppFollow*.
5. Get real time notifications about new reviews in Slack, HipChat, Zendesk, Trello or Email.
6. Check app metadata and changes from version to version (ASO changes, what’s new, etc.).
7. Monitor app positions based on selected keywords and positions in category tops.
8. Analyse changes using charts and reports estimating ASO- optimisation and effectiveness of marketing strategy.
9. Access data via public API, create customised reports or dashboards.
10. Receive Slack notifications about changes in category tops, keywords, new versions and app featuring. Soon sales reports will be available as well.

* Direct reply is actually the only feature that requires integration with Google Play Dev Console.

Here are the few tips on how you can get the most from AppFollow:

• Create an app collection with the list of the rival apps. Now you can stay updated on all the changes happening with your competitors. And learning about their customer sentiment can give you ideas on how to improve your own app.
• You can tag reviews within AppFollow. Add tags like “feature” or “bug”, then once in awhile filter reviews by this tags and you can have some ideas on next features to implement or what bothers your users most of all.
• Use of Slack integration can help get access to the appstore data for all your team members at once without need of sharing access to dev console. Or even make this data public if you choose according channel.
• Any review in AppFollow can be shared as a picture to any social network which can be used to improve your SMM.

It’s very easy to discover all opportunities of AppFollow. Create your Free account and track 2 apps in 2 countries and 10 keywords. If you need more, subscribe to Premium plan which starts from $9 /month.

Get 30% off for Premium subscription by upvoting AppFollow on ProductHunt. Your support is very appreciated.

Happy Tracking!

P. S. Btw if you’d like to monitor user activity (new users, launches, sessions, etc.) in Slack, you should definitely try statsbot.