IOS development tools-AppStore statistical tools

With the popularity of iOS development, some companies have provided specialized solutions or tools for iOS development. These solutions or tools include umeng, Flurry, and Google Analytics, App Store sales analysis tools such as App annie, and App crash collection tools such as Crashlytics ), app testing and publishing tool Test Flight), App Push service, etc.

These solutions or tools save a lot of time for iOS developers to develop. However, due to the lack of related articles, many developers are repeating their own attempts to create new wheels again and again. Therefore, I hope to organize my own third-party service experience related to research into a series of articles so that developers can save a lot of repetitive work.

Today, we will introduce AppStore statistical tools: App Annie and Apple's command line statistical tools.

App Annie Introduction

The sales data statistics function provided by Apple's official iTunes Connect is relatively weak. For example, you can only save detailed sales data for the last 30 days. The interface is ugly and you cannot view the App ranking history.

AppAnnie is a statistical analysis tool dedicated to developers for AppStore-related data. This tool can collect statistics on App downloads, ranking changes, sales revenue, and user reviews in the AppStore.

Principle

AppAnnie uses the management account you configured to send a request to itunes connect to obtain data about your App, including daily downloads, user rating data, and sales data.

Register a Sales account

To use AppAnnie, you must first configure a Sales account in Apple's official itunes connect. Because the default developer account is Admin-level permission, this permission is very high, you can modify the price of the App or directly remove the product. If you directly configure this account in AppAnnie, although it does not affect its access to relevant data, it has certain account security risks.

The procedure for configuring this account is as follows:

1. log on to itunes connect and select Manager Users.

2. Select iTunes Connect User

3. Click Add new User.

4. Fill in the relevant information of the new user

5. Select Sales as the user type.

6. Set "Notifications" to "All Notifications. Click the position shown in the figure to select all.

7. After that, you will receive an activation email from iTunes Connect. Click the activation link in the email to go to the account registration page, and then register the account to activate it. If the email address has already registered an Apple Id, the logon page is displayed. You can activate it after logging on to the mailbox.

Register an App Annie account and configure it

Open the official website of App Annie: http://www.appannie.com/, registration steps and general steps of the site, I will not introduce, after the registration of the configuration steps are as follows:

1. Add the iTunes Connect account on the settings page.

2. Enter your Sales account and password added in iTunes Connect.

3. Select "receive daily Report" in User Setting.

4. In this way, you can receive related statistical emails from AppAnnie every day. The following is an email from the sales report of chalk net:

Official command line tool

If you feel that it is not safe to hand over your sales data to a third-party statistics service provider. You can use the Autoingestion. class tool officially provided by Apple to obtain daily sales data and store it in a local database.

Here is the tool, and Apple's help documentation for this user is here.

The following describes how to use this tool. After downloading Autoingestion. class, switch to the directory where the class file is located, and run the following command to obtain the corresponding statistics:

 
 

  
  
Java Autoingestion <Account Name> <password> <report type> <time type> <report subtype> <time> 
 
 

The vendor Id is obtained at the position shown in iTunes Connect. It is a sequence starting with a number 8.

<Report type> optional values: Sales or Newsstand

<Time type> optional values: Daily, Weekly, Monthly, or Yearly

<Report subtype> optional values: Summary, Detailed or Opt-In

<Time> given in the following format: YYYYMMDD

The following is an example, which will obtain the daily sales summary data for January 1, May 8, 2013.

 
 

  
  
java Autoingestion username@fenbi.com password 85587619 Sales Daily Summary 20130508 
 
 

I tried this tool and thought it was still too rough. I could only back up the sales data. If I had to do statistical reports like AppAnnie, I still needed to write a lot of code. In addition, this tool does not provide ranking changes of apps in App Store as App Annie does. Although you can capture data by yourself, it also requires a lot of work.

Other services similar to App Annie

Services like App Annie include AppFigures. After I tried it, I found that it is not as powerful as App Annie. But as an alternative, we will also introduce it to you.

There are also some open-source statistical tools on Github. You can try them if you are interested. These tools are basically enhancements to Apple's command line tools, such as adding a moderate function to import data to the database.

Function Comparison

Although the command line tools provided by App Annie and Apple can collect statistics on App Store data, their functions differ greatly. Apple's command line tool only provides statistics and backup of sales data by day, week, month, or year. In addition to providing these functions with better interfaces and interactions, App Annie can also track App ranking changes and the location of apps in Apple's various lists.

We recommend that you use statistical tools such as App Annie or AppFigures to conveniently view App sales and rankings.

Posted by Tang Qiao Jun 16th, 2013