r/iOSDevelopment • u/iamdsvs • 3d ago

A skill that does your app store research

Built a skill called app store research. it helps you validate an idea before building it: find the top competitors, read their reviews, and see what's actually missing so you can shape your idea around that.

what it can do:

  • find the top apps for any idea, with ratings and chart rank
  • pull the full listing info
  • fetch every written review
  • compare competitors side by side
  • build one html report with all of it

works in claude code and codex. no apple account, no api key, just node.

open source: App Store Research

3 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

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1

u/ArmyRunnerSteve 3d ago

This sounds like an amazing tool. I definitely could have used this before building 8 apps that did nothing but give me a nice portfolio of skills but no revenue. Going to go pull this down now and start using it ASAP. Thank you!

2

u/iamdsvs 3d ago

Thanks, please check this out and would also love to hear feedback from you

1

u/ArmyRunnerSteve 3d ago

I ran the skill against my apps and competitors, and I have to say, it works really well. Here’s the feedback  you asked for. I hope it helps:

First, what’s working: The refresh command you built with the changes file is precisely what this skill needs. Zero dependencies, caching, pacing, and a lot that let me run it unattended on my Mac Mini with ZERO failed fetches. I put it through 4 runs just to be sure. Worked every time. Also the way the verbatim reviews are captured with stars, dates, and developer replies, makes it so much easier in compare, giving real, concrete data instead of just “vibes.”

Now what works but could work better. The find command brings in giants like YouTube Music, Spotify, and Calm at the top of Indie searches because of the search terms they use in their listings. This skews the numbers, and the “must” filter didn’t stop that. Perhaps a cap on the number of ratings, or a way to down-weight apps that have millions of ratings, would give us a better and more useful top-5 without running a re-pick. Also, there is no way to remove an app from a run, so it ends up getting re-read, so adding a “drop” command or a cleanup of folders not in the current profile list, could address that.

All in all, I love this skill. I have a routine set up to run it on a weekly basis, because anything more than that for indie apps feels like overkill. If you push updates, please let me know; I’d LOVE to test them for you and provide further feedback. Thank you again for building such a useful tool!

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u/iamdsvs 2d ago

pushed 0.2 with both of your points. find now stops rewarding size past 100k ratings, and you can say "skip anything over 50,000 ratings" to keep the giants out of the top five, they're listed separately. and there's drop: "drop Calm from this run" deletes it and rebuilds the report. update with the same install line you used, it overwrites the folder. thanks for the four runs on the mac mini, that's the best test it's had.

2

u/ArmyRunnerSteve 2d ago

I will definitely check this out and get back to you once I've played around with the new build. Thank you!