You Could Ship This vs. Appfigures

Appfigures is a well-built app analytics and ASO (App Store Optimization) platform. It tracks your app's rankings, monitors reviews, helps you research keywords, and gives you dashboards for downloads and revenue. If you have an app on the store and want to grow it, Appfigures is genuinely useful.

But here's the thing. If you don't have an app yet? If you're at the "I need to figure out what to build" stage? Appfigures doesn't really help with that.

It's like buying a gym membership when what you actually need is a map to the gym.

Optimize vs. discover

Appfigures sits in the "optimize" part of the app lifecycle. You've shipped something, now you want more downloads, better keyword rankings, and a handle on your review sentiment. Totally valid. Important, even.

We sit in the "discover" part. The part before you've written a single line of code. You need to find a problem worth solving, confirm that real people are frustrated enough to switch, and make sure nobody else has already built the good version.

These are two very different stages, and using the wrong tool for the wrong stage wastes time and money.

Side by side

They're actually complementary

This isn't really an either/or situation. The ideal workflow looks something like:

1. Use our dataset to find a high-scoring opportunity
2. Build the app
3. Ship it to the App Store
4. Then use Appfigures to track performance, optimize your keywords, and monitor reviews

We get you from "what should I build" to "OK, building it." Appfigures picks up from "it's on the store" to "let's grow it." You might end up using both. But you start here.

The Appfigures teardown angle

Appfigures does publish some great free content, by the way. Their app teardowns are worth reading if you're interested in how specific apps are performing. We're fans.

But their teardowns cover a handful of well-known apps. We cover 6,219 opportunities that almost nobody is talking about. The poorly-rated niche apps, the abandoned paid apps still making money, the category gaps that won't show up in any teardown because they're not famous enough to write about.

That's where the opportunities are. Not in analyzing Candy Crush's revenue, but in finding the 2-star music notation app at #42 on the paid charts that nobody's bothered to replace.