Posted by admin on Apr 17, 2010 in
iPhone,
weather With every new week, there is a new opportunity to be added to the App Store’s Featured lists. I don’t know about you, but I definitely want to know if my apps have been picked! We have previously discussed AppStoreRank, a Perl script which simply goes out, and gets the app store rank for your application for each country, based on a simple to set up hash at the top of the script.
Here’s a sample of two apps, Hurricane and Weather HD:
my @appName = (
{ appName =>"Hurricane",
appID => 291430598,
popId => ['Paid App','Gross App'],
genreId => 36,
featuredCategories => ["New and Noteworthy","Whats Hot","Staff Favorites"],
categoryName => ["Weather","Top Overall"] },
{ appName =>"Weather HD",
appID => 364193735,
popId => ['Paid iPad App','Gross iPad App'],
genreId => 36,
featuredCategories => ["Staff Favorites"],
categoryName => ["Weather","Top Overall"] },
);
As you can see above, we now have a featuredCategories hash key which is a plain english way of getting the single “Staff Favorites” from Weather HD, or multiple featuredCategories as you can see in Hurricane.
This simple syntax allows you to set which featuredCategories you would like to use. featuredCategories is not required, so if you would not like to see the results of searching the featured categories, you can remove the whole line.
The available options can be found at the bottom of the script, where we have taken them out of the way of the actual running of the code. This makes it a lot easier to debug on my part, and well, where they are placed really does not matter. You will most likely set this up once, and forget about it.
By default, this script will only get featured categories on Tuesdays, since this is the day that Apple changes the featured list around the world. You will want to make sure that you run the script in the morning of your time zone, so if there is a delay based on time zone, you can catch all countries you are featured in. In addition, a simple change in the code:
if($wday ==2) {
will enable you to change from Tuesday to Wednesday, or allow for multiple days. Removing the check all together will allow this part of the script to be run daily.
If you want to see this type of information in a graph on your Mac, I highly suggest you take a look at AppViz. This is an app that I use daily in addition to my script to ensure that I have the most up to date information about all of my apps!
Once again, my script is a modification of the original by Erica Sandun which was published back in 2008. Unlike some of the other modifications of her script, this one doesn’t require extra packages, and it just works. I keep this script up to date since I have it set on a cron to check the statistics during the middle of the night and email the report back to me… I like waking up to the fresh smell of statistics in the morning, don’t you?
Happy tracking!
Download: AppStoreRank.zip
Tags: app store, iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, ranking, update
Posted by admin on May 23, 2009 in
iPhone In my previous post, I mentioned an app that shows you your current ranking in the iTunes App Store. This list is modified for order, but uses the script:
Hurricane Ranking in Category Weather:
Mexico: 1
United States: 8
Canada: 11
El Salvador: 12
Slovenia: 17
Indonesia: 22
Deutschland: 24
Thailand: 26
Singapore: 29
Luxembourg: 29
Argentina: 31
Sweden: 33
United Kingdom: 35
Greece: 32
Italia: 45
Belgium: 46
Nederland: 46
Espana: 51
Turkey: 53
Norway: 55
Japan: 57
France: 61
Schweitz/Suisse: 61
Australia: 70
Using this perl script, I could also take a look to see how my competition is doing in the same markets. For data and information, the possibilities are endless.
Tags: app store, hurricane, iPhone, ranking
Posted by admin on May 23, 2009 in
iPhone A few months ago, I posted that our Hurricane App hit #1 in Mexico. I checked back again yesterday, and it still seems to be at #1, or it hit #1 again. While I haven’t automated the check, I did notice that there were a lot of people looking for how to find their App Ranking in various countries in the iTunes store. For us, tracking the ranking of Hurricane has been fairly easy. We have remained in the top 25 paid weather apps in the US since the release on September 16, 2008, and have been within the top 10 since February, and hit top 5 when a storm looked like it was brewing this week. Over all, considering the amount of apps that are now in the weather category, and that Hurricane is a very niche app, it is doing exceedingly well.
When looking for your app ranking in other countries, the missing key is simply to go to the iTunes Store main page, scroll all the way down to the bottom, then use the select box to switch your country, or click on the flag dot to see a list of flags and countries.
Once you are in the new country, click on App Store, and your category, then start searching for your app. You cannot use the “search” feature because you will loose your place. Quite annoying I assure you.
To find your reviews, there are automated systems out there which you can purchase and/or use.
AppViz by Ideaswarm – $29.95 – Mac OSX
This Mac OSX application not only downloads and visualizes decent daily/weekly/monthly monetary reports, it also pulls the reviews for each country. It will also export the original reports. This app has saved me hours of spreadsheet time! I fire this app up a few times a week to check on how things are going with my sales.
AppSales – a Google Code project – Free – iPhone
I have this app loaded on my iPhone. When I got it, it was the only iPhone App tracker app available for the iPhone. This is the app I look at every day to see where my sales for the previous day were. This app shows you your daily and weekly sales, accumulates them for the month, as well as the break downs per app and per country. It is a very simple interface, giving the basic necessities. They have an updated version which also has graphing – which I will need to pick up very soon! Someone asked why they are not selling this app in the App Store, and the simple reason was because they want you the user to know that your data is secure. This app must be compiled by a developer and put onto an iPhone. Considering my financial information is in that app, along with identification information, I am VERY okay with that reasoning.
Sales Tracker by CXI Gaming – $18.99 – iPhone
This app can be found in the iTunes App Store. I haven’t checked it out, since I’ve already paid for AppViz. However, it seems to have all the same data as AppSales, with a much more refined interface. For security, they say they use the Apple Keychain, and have the ability to turn off automatic login. The drawback that I can see with this app is that it requires OS 2.2.1, which means that anyone who has not yet upgraded their iPhones (not sure why this would be an issue for a developer??) will find this app a waste of their money.
Scraping AppStore Reviews article by Erica Sadun – Perl Script
If you are looking to pull iPhone Reviews and understand Perl, this article was written with all the details, and the script. This script could also get you started on pulling app store ranking as well. But you really need to dive in and understand the system before you can do this.
Scraping App Store Rankings Around the World article by Ben Chatelain – Perl Script
This however is the script to beat all scripts. Again, it’s written in Perl, but it will report back what your current app store ranking is in each country. This one I just found while writing this article, but now, I think I will go give it a whirl. It would be neat to see if I can get AppViz to incorporate this into their application 
In short, a quick Google search on what you are looking for really provides some great results. Some of these things I happen to know about because of word of mouth, so maybe this will help those apps get a little more visibility.
If you know of other apps that I have not listed here, please feel free to comment!
Tags: app store, finance, hurricane, iPhone, ranking, reviews, tracking
