How to keep an eye on competitor apps

What is worth watching in a competitor’s app, how to do it by hand once a week, and how to be told when something changes.

5 min readUpdated

Your competitors tell you what they have learned, for free, every time they change something in public. A new title means they found better keywords. New screenshots mean the old ones were not converting. A price change means they are testing what people will pay.

You do not need to watch everything. Pick three to five apps: the leader of your niche, the one closest to yours, and one that is growing fast.

What is worth watching

  • New versions and their notes. How often they ship, and what they chose to build.
  • The title and subtitle. A change here is a keyword decision. Note the words they added and the ones they dropped.
  • Screenshots and icon. The first screenshot is the most tested picture in the store. When it changes, look at what the new one says.
  • Price and purchases. A new tier or a changed price is an experiment you can learn from.
  • Search positions. Where they sit for the keywords you both want.
  • Reviews. What their users complain about this month is what you can do better.
  • New apps from the same developer. Often the first sign of where they are going next.

A weekly check by hand

  1. Keep a simple sheet

    One row per competitor: title, subtitle, version, date, price. Add a folder of screenshots of their store pages.

  2. Open each store page

    Compare with last week’s row. The version history on the page shows what shipped and when.

  3. Search your main keywords

    Note where each competitor sits. A jump usually follows a title change or a big update.

  4. Read the newest reviews

    Sort by most recent and read the low-star ones.

It takes about half an hour a week for five apps, and it is easy to skip. The weak point is the store page itself: once a competitor replaces a title or a screenshot, the old one is gone unless you saved it.

Being told instead of checking

In IndieTower, open an app and press Save. From then on it is re-checked every day, and every change to its title, subtitle, icon, screenshots or price is kept under Store page changes on its page, with what it was before. Mark your own app and add the others as its competitors, and the Tracking timeline shows a month of versions and changes for all of them in one grid.

New versions and changes can arrive in a morning email, or in Slack or Discord on a paid plan. A free account tracks 2 apps; the Indie plan tracks 50. How tracking works.

Track an app

Save a competitor and hear about new versions and store page changes.

Track an app Start free
Next guideHow to see the new apps released todayWhy the stores have no real “new today” list, what their “new” charts actually show, and where to see every launch by day.