In the past year, freelancer Paddy Donnelly and developer Alain Hufkens have launched the kiddie-centric Wee Rockets and Wee Subs for iOS. But now, out of frustration “at the lack of good iOS apps to monitor sales and revenue” as they put it, they’ve built their own to do just that.
Optimized for iPhone and iPod touch, The Stat App hits the App Store today, claiming to strip out the unnecessary features that “weigh down many of the other apps out there”. With that in mind, we gave it a quick test-drive to see what it’s all about.
How it works
The Stat App has actually had a long journey to market, with work starting early last year. Originally, they planned to use App Annie‘s API, though they eventually decided to use AppFigures instead – primarily because it allows developers to enable logging-in via oAuth.
So here we are today, and The Stat App is looking to bring its own flavor of app-alytics to the table, with an uber-simple way of tracking downloads and revenue.
Given it taps AppFigures’ API, you will need to log-in with your AppFigures credentials on your iPhone, after which The Stat App will pull in the relevant data and display accordingly. By using oAuth, this means you don’t have to give your username and password to The Stat App.
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It’s free to monitor one app only though. So if you have numerous in the App Store, you’ll have to upgrade to the Pro version which gives you unlimited access. This will cost you $1.99 via an in-app purchase, though it is only $0.99 for the first week of launch.
When Donnelly says that they’ve kept things simple, he’s not lying. It basically serves up a view for all-time, monthly, weekly or daily, giving you two broad figures – downloads and dollars.
Tap on the little pane at the bottom, and you’re taken through to more data, including revenue from downloads and in-app purchases, while scrolling down breaks all this down by country.
If this is literally all the information you need on the move, then The Stat App will serve you well. Though there are reasons why companies such as AppFigures and AppAnnie deliver more comprehensive data on the Web and mobile – many developers like to drill-down into their figures to see exactly what’s what. Charts to help you visualize trends, user reviews, ratings-by-country and many other features aren’t included here – but that is for good reason. The Stat App is all about ‘the broad overview’, delivering key metrics via a clean interface.
“We built the app initially for ourselves to have a much more minimal and clean view of our apps’ figures,” explains Donnelly. “We were frustrated by a lot of other apps out there, where they pack in every detail and feature, while compromising the clarity of information. We built The Stat App for people who just want to keep an eye on their numbers without all the clutter.”
There are others out there, of course, such as Check for AppFigures, which also serves up a beautiful, clean interface for your vital statistics. There are a few differences though, for example Check for AppFigures doesn’t separate out downloads by country, and it costs $1.99 from the get-go, even to monitor just one app. But it does include nice graphs to display your data, which The Stat App doesn’t.
The Stat App is available to download now.
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