Tracking Apps on Android
If you are like us, you are having trouble tracking apps across countries. You have made a great app but you don’t know if anyone is seeing it. Each country has a different Google Play view. If you want alot of downloads you need to make a “top” list on Google Play or another market. Like most curious developers you probably load up Google Play and look at the top lists. The problem is you are only seeing the top list for the country you are in. Sometimes you develop an App for a country you are not in. For instance we have a Road Sign App for Indonesia, there is no way for us to tell from our current country whether we have made an impact other than looking at our total downloads and guessing. There are a few options we have found but I will describe the two we use most often.
AppAnnie
AppAnnie started out tracking apps on IOS but has recently moved to Android. It only covers Google play but it does track across 46 countries (Indonesia being one of them). AppAnnie will track your Google Play sales, ranks, downloads, and reviews.It comes with a nice graphical representation of all information. It connects via your developer account so all your apps will be imported so you can see how they compare against each other.
Tracking Android Apps on AppAnnie
Sometimes you will be surprised how your apps do. For instance we briefly started having out apps rank in Chile. The reason I don’t know but it did give us a quick download spike and indicated to us that maybe we need to use some Spanish localization for our apps.
Distimo
Distimo on the other hand tracks apps in multiple markets. As I write this we use Distimo to track apps in Amazon, Getjar, Google Play, and Samsung app stores. The interface is not as “beautiful” as AppAnnie but with more complexity comes more data. Our apps vary greatly among the different app stores so this is an invaluable resource. In addition to the multiple android app stores, you can add your “competitors” to your account and review how you do against them in different categories. Additionally you can track your ad revenue across multiple companies as well, not just the basic admob.
In conclusion, I think both are needed. While Distimo does duplicate the information given to us from AppAnnie. AppAnnie is much quicker to look at and get a daily idea of how your apps are doing, even if it is only on Google Play. When you need to get down to the nitty gritty then I suggest digging through Distimo’s data but on a daily basis AppAnnie suffices.
If you have something else you like to use for tracking apps on Android, leave us a comment in the Disqus forum below.