Have you ever wanted to know everything about all the App Stores out there? Which Twitter app sells the most in Italy, which note taking software is popular in Japan..that’s very likely if you’re a developer and you’d like to know how your app is going internationally, or if you’re a blogger and you’re always looking for new stuff. There are many applications for iPhone that let you discover new apps, like App Popular and App Saurus (I reviewed both of them here and here), but what about tracking existing applications? Wouldn’t it be great to see what kind of software sells well in Asia, or how a price change affected the charting position of an app?
Today I’ll talk about PositionApp, a new app for iPhone that lets you do this and so much more.
PositionApp is both a discovery and performance tracking tool. It doesn’t suggest you new apps basing on your personal preferences, it presents you a huge list of apps divided by countries instead. It’s based on the historic App Store’s data and it requires an active internet connection to query the immense database that gives you access to all the chart positions of the top 300 apps. As you can guess, it’s an iPhone developer dream come true.
This app is meant for developers and people who are interested in knowing what’s going on in the App Store, at a worldwide level. The main interface is made of 4 bottom tabs: Dashboard, Favorites, Search and Browse. The dashboard displays the top 100 and top 300 from the App Store you choose as default (in the Preferences) and the apps you’ve marked as favorite. There’s a refresh button as well that lets you update the database with the latest data, which are fetched at regular intervals. The favorite and search tabs are pretty self explanatory, as they let you jump to a specific app (fav) and search for an application, filtering by name and developer.
The core of PositionApp is the browse section. From here you have access to your country, top countries and the full list of App Stores in alphabetical order. Once you pick up a country you’ll be presented a list with all the available categories; choose one and the magic happens. First, you’ll have to wait a few seconds (tested with a wifi connection) as the app has to query a very large database. It’s great to see how the developers optimized the process anyways, it’s an outstanding achievement in speed. You can choose between free and paid apps, select the position change from day / week / month, sort by position, change, name and release. The most important feature is, obviously, the position change, which displays the current position of an application in the charts and how many positions it gained or lost during the specific time frame you chose. For example, Camera Genius is at the 14th position, but it lost 3 positions during the week.
Another cool thing happens if you tap on a single app: PositionApp will display how that app’s doing in the other stores. You can then email that report or enter another screen with the info about the app as seen in iTunes and jump to App Store.app to download it. Awesome.
PositionApp sports a cool user interface design powered by nice sliding animations when changing tabs and sections. It’s very well designed and it’s a real pleasure to tap and see detailed reports.
PositionApp is free for a limited time only and you can go download it here. If you’re an iPhone developer this is a must-have, as it provides a beautiful and useful way to track your creations. On the other hand, if you’re that kind of user that cares about discovering new apps - you’ve got to use this.
