FAQ

ASOblick is a Mac app for people who make apps. It sits in your menu bar and answers one question at a glance: how is my app doing today? Underneath the glance there is a full workroom: keyword rankings checked daily, popularity read from Apple’s own search suggestions, a place to write your store text and measure what it did, a screenshot studio, your reviews, your revenue if you choose to connect it, a log of what you changed and what happened after, most of it recorded without typing, and a research module for ideas you have not built yet. There is no account and no server. You download it, add your app, and the numbers start moving.

There is nothing to sign up for. ASOblick has no login screen and no password to remember, and there is no server behind the app: everything runs on your Mac, using the App Store’s own public data. Each day it checks where you stand for every keyword you track and turns the raw results into numbers that make sense at a glance. You download it, add the app you want to watch, pick a few keywords, and the numbers start filling in. If you later want your revenue in the app, that is an optional key you add yourself, and it stays in your Mac’s Keychain. Everything else works in the first minute the app is open.

Almost everything you see is Apple’s own data. ASOblick runs the same App Store searches anyone can run by hand, from your Mac, and writes down where your app came up that day. Revenue, if you turn it on, comes from your own App Store Connect account. Two numbers are the exception, and the app labels both as its own. Difficulty estimates how hard a keyword would be to win, worked out from what already ranks there. Popularity estimates how often people search a term, worked out from the order Apple’s suggestions put it in. Apple publishes the ordering, not the number, so the number is ASOblick’s reading of it. The app says exactly that in the place where it shows each one.

No, and there is nothing in the app that asks for one. Rankings, keywords, keyword popularity, and the screenshot studio all run on public App Store data, so there are no credentials to hand over. Revenue and Apple Ads are the parts that need permission, because those numbers are private to you. For revenue you create an App Store Connect API key, which is a small file Apple issues from your own developer account, and ASOblick keeps it in your Mac’s Keychain and uses it only on your Mac. Apple Ads has its own key, generated on your Mac so the secret half never leaves it, and that stays in your Keychain too. Two things to know about that one: Apple requires a separate API user for it, which for a solo developer means creating a second Apple Account, and the ads numbers are part of Pro. Both connections are optional. Leave them off and everything else works the same.

Yes. ASOblick tracks Mac App Store apps alongside iPhone and iPad ones, with the same daily keyword checks, the same history, and the same screenshot studio. Two differences are worth knowing before you start. Apple does not publish top charts for the Mac App Store the way it does for iPhone, so where a chart position would normally sit, ASOblick tells you the data does not exist for Mac instead of filling the space with a number it invented. And the popularity figure beside a keyword is read from the iPhone App Store, because Apple does not share what people type into the Mac App Store’s search box. ASOblick says so on screen next to every Mac app’s popularity number rather than letting you assume it came from the Mac store. Where Apple publishes nothing, the app says so in plain words.

Because a dashboard you have to go and open is a dashboard you stop opening. ASOblick lives in your menu bar, so today’s ranks are one glance away while you work: no tab to find, no page to load, nothing to log into. Being a Mac app is also what keeps the numbers on your machine. It runs its App Store searches from your Mac, and the answers stay there. A native app can also do things a web page cannot, like hold a live number in your menu bar and notify you when the day’s check lands. The trade is deliberate.

There is a free version, with no login, and there are two paid plans. Pro is $14.99 a month or $119 a year and includes 5 tracked apps. Max is $49.99 a month or $399 a year and removes the app limit; everything else is the same. Pro lifts the free limits: unlimited keywords and competitors, every country you choose to track compared side by side, every keyword suggestion, idea lookups without the daily cap, the metadata workshop, the log of what you changed, charts over all your history, rank history as a CSV file, and your Apple Ads terms. Revenue and reviews are not the paid part: your first app gets both on the free plan, and Pro extends them to every other app you track. Those are prices in US dollars, and Apple sets each country’s price from these. Billing runs through your App Store account, the same as any other app you buy from Apple, which is also where you cancel it.

The free version watches one app with five keywords, checked every day, against one competitor, in the one country you picked when you added it (switching country later is part of Pro). Of the keyword ideas ASOblick’s nightly research turns up for your app, it shows you the top three. Its keyword charts cover the last fourteen days, so you can see whether a keyword is climbing or sliding rather than only where it sits today, and the revenue chart covers the last thirty. Nothing is ever deleted: every check ASOblick makes is kept on your Mac from the first day, and Pro simply charts all of it. Your first app also gets its reviews and, if you connect a key, its revenue. It sends daily notifications, so you learn where you stand without opening anything. And it includes the whole screenshot studio, every preset and every export. The Ideas module is free too, five lookups a day: the cap is about load rather than money, because one lookup asks Apple up to seven questions. There is no login and no account, so nothing stands between downloading the app and seeing your first numbers. The free version is where you find out whether these numbers tell you anything useful.

Yes. The studio is not a teaser. Every preset and every export is in the free version, with no watermark stamped in the corner and no time limit counting down. Make one set of screenshots or make forty, and pay nothing. The studio is free because the part of ASOblick that costs money is the watching: more apps and keywords checked daily, charts over all of your history rather than the last fortnight, more countries, more competitors, the workshop where you write your store text, and the log of what you changed. Screenshots are a job you do once per release. Watching the store is the job that never ends, and that is the part a subscription pays for.

No. Pro is a subscription, $14.99 a month or $119 a year, or, for more than 5 apps, Max at $49.99 a month or $399 a year. Both are billed through your App Store account like any other app you buy from Apple. If subscribing is what puts you off, look at what stopping actually does here: nothing is deleted. The app returns to its free limits, your oldest tracked app keeps updating, any other apps pause with their saved data intact, and everything resumes if you subscribe again. You cancel in your App Store account settings, and the paid features run to the end of the period you paid for. Those are prices in US dollars, and Apple sets each country’s price from these.

In your App Store account settings, the same way you cancel any other App Store subscription. Apple handles the billing for ASOblick, so cancelling happens on Apple’s side, in the list of subscriptions attached to your Apple Account. There is no form here to fill in and no email to send, and ASOblick never sees your card. When the subscription ends, everything you tracked stays on your Mac, history included. You go back to the free plan’s limits on adding: one app, five keywords, one competitor, one country. Nothing already tracked is taken away, and your first app’s daily checks carry on. Subscribe again later and the limits lift, with your old history still underneath.

Nothing gets deleted. Everything you tracked stays on your Mac, because that is where it lived the whole time. Going back to the free plan means going back to the free scope: your first app keeps its daily checks, its reviews, and its revenue, keyword charts go back a fortnight while the revenue chart keeps its last 30 days, and each app stays on the country it was already watching. Any other apps you added pause: their saved history stays on your Mac, but new checks wait for Pro. Pick Pro up again later and everything resumes where it left off, full history included, because the app never threw anything away.

Three ordinary reasons cover most cases. First, a newly released app can take a little while to turn up in search results at all, so give it time before you change anything. Second, you only rank in the countries where your app is on sale, so check that you are searching the same store you released in. Third, the words you can rank for come from three places: your app name, your subtitle (the short line under the name), and the Keyword field in App Store Connect (a hidden list of terms only Apple reads). If your app is live and still cannot be found by its own name weeks later, the problem is in that listing text.

There is no list Apple hands you. The only way to know is to run the search and look at what comes back, then run it again tomorrow, because the result changes. ASOblick does that for you: every keyword you track gets checked daily, in the country you picked, and the position your app landed in gets written down. After a week you have a line rather than a snapshot. This word is climbing, that one slipped four places, this one has not moved since you added it. Searching by hand tells you about today. Keeping the history tells you the direction.

Two questions decide it. Do people type this? And can you win it? For the first, ASOblick reads Apple’s own search suggestions into a popularity score, the list that drops down as you type in the App Store, and the order that list comes back in. Apple does not publish how that order is worked out, but it is the closest public signal of what people actually type. For the second there is difficulty, ASOblick’s estimate of how hard the fight would be, based on which apps already rank for the word. The keywords worth your time sit where real demand meets a beatable field. One more thing: skip words your app name already owns, and spend the room on terms your listing does not cover yet.

It matters. Your app name and your subtitle (the short line under the name on your App Store page) are both read by Apple when it works out what your app is about, alongside the hidden Keyword field. Nobody outside Apple knows how the three are weighted against each other, and anyone who quotes you a ranking of them is guessing. A made-up word on its own gives Apple nothing to match a search against. A name that says what the app does gives it a whole phrase people might type. The common pattern is both: the brand, then a plain description of the job, across the name and the subtitle. Before you spend an afternoon on the hidden Keyword field, spend it on those two lines.

Two waits, one after the other. Changes to your app name, subtitle, or Keyword field go live with your next app update, so nothing shifts the moment you type them. Once they are live, positions move over days and weeks rather than minutes, and they keep moving as other apps update too. That is why a single check tells you very little. One position on one day is noise. The same keyword checked every day for two weeks is a direction, and a direction is something you can act on. ASOblick keeps that history for you, so the difference is visible without you writing anything down.

Difficulty answers one question: if you go after this keyword, how hard will the fight be? ASOblick estimates it from what the App Store itself shows: which apps already rank for the keyword and how strong they are. It is ASOblick’s own estimate, not a number from Apple, and the app says so right where it shows it. Scores from different tools disagree because each invents its own formula, so never compare numbers across tools. Use it to compare keywords against each other inside ASOblick: lower means an easier fight.

Start typing in the App Store search box and Apple offers you a list of completions. That list comes back in an order, and the order is not alphabetical and not random. Apple does not publish how it is worked out, but it is the closest public signal of what people actually type into that box. ASOblick reads that ordering and turns it into the popularity figure next to a keyword, which is the word you will see on screen. The number is ASOblick’s own, and the app says so; what it rests on is Apple’s suggestion list. Two things it is not. It is not a download count, and it is not a monthly search volume with a decimal point on it. It tells you which of two keywords more people are looking for, and that is the question that changes what you write in your listing.

Apple does not publish how search ranking is worked out, so anyone quoting you an exact weight for ratings is guessing. What is visible from the outside is that better-rated apps tend to sit higher for the keywords they compete on. The second effect is easier to see. Given two search results, more people tap the one with four and a half stars than the one with three, so your rating shapes how many of the people who found you go on to download. Either way the work is the same. Ask for the rating at a good moment, answer the reviews you get, and fix what they keep telling you.

In the Workshop. It is the second of ASOblick’s seven modules, and it is a scratchpad for the three fields Apple reads: your title, your subtitle, and the hidden 100-character keyword field. Your title arrives filled in from your live App Store listing. Apple does not publish subtitles, and your keyword field is visible only to you, so those two start blank because ASOblick genuinely cannot read them.

As you type it splits Apple’s 100 characters into three: the ones doing work, the ones buying nothing, and the ones you have not spent. A character buys nothing for one of five reasons, and every flagged word says which applies to it: the word is already in your title or subtitle, it appears twice in the keyword field, it is the word “app”, it is a plural of something you already have, or nothing in your research pool searches for it. The first four are Apple’s own rules, and one click strips those words out. The fifth is ASOblick’s estimate, so those words sit behind their own button: the app has not seen a search using them, which is not the same as knowing they are wasted.

Underneath sit two lists: the searches your draft can already appear in, and the ones it cannot, with the exact words missing from each.

Nothing here touches your store page. You compose, copy, and paste into App Store Connect yourself. When you have, you tell the Workshop you published, and it records the date and the three fields and then compares your keyword ranks either side of it. The Workshop is part of Pro.

Yes, that is what the Log is for. It holds what you changed and what happened to your app on one timeline, so that six months from now the questions that matter are answerable: when the subtitle last changed, or whether the new screenshots went up before or after the numbers moved.

Most of it is never typed. The daily check compares your listing with the last one it saw, so a new version, a price change and a change to your App Store title each become an entry on their own. The metadata updates you record in the Workshop land there too. What is left for you is the things ASOblick cannot see from outside: new screenshots, a new icon, an ad budget, a mention somewhere. Those take a few words.

Click any entry and it shows what your numbers did over the stretch that followed it. That stretch stops at your next entry rather than at today, because once a second change is in flight the days after it belong to two things at once, and the panel tells you how long the clean stretch was. When there was no room to read anything, because your next change landed a day later, it says so instead of printing numbers.

What it will not tell you is whether a change worked. It sets your entry beside the days that followed and never claims the change is the reason. Reading the Log is part of Pro, but the recording runs on every plan, so nothing is missed while you decide.

Yes, in two ways.

Ideas works with nothing tracked at all. Name an idea in two or three plain words and ASOblick asks the App Store what people search around those words, then reads the results for each one: how popular the phrase looks, how hard it would be to win, and which app holds the top result today. It is the question worth answering before you build, rather than after: does anyone look for this, and who is already answering them.

One thing it will not do is dress an empty answer up. Apple’s suggestions come from a search box completing what someone types, so a written-out sentence returns nothing however popular the subject is. When nothing comes back, ASOblick says which of three things happened: it could not reach Apple, you asked in a shape that box never completes, or Apple genuinely has nothing for those words, which for a short everyday phrase usually does mean few people type it. Five lookups a day are free, and Pro removes the cap.

The second way is a planned app. If your app is not in the store yet you can add it as planned, pick keywords, watch rivals and compose your store text before you submit. On launch day it flips to live tracking and everything you collected carries over. Composing the store text happens in the Workshop, which is part of Pro; adding a planned app and tracking searches for it is not.

Yes. Pro exports an app’s rank history as a CSV file: one row per check, with the date, the keyword, the country code and where you ranked. A blank rank means ASOblick searched and did not find you in the first 200 results, which is different from a day it never checked, and those days simply have no row.

That is the rank history specifically, not a dump of everything in the app. The rest is not locked away either, though: there is no account and no server, so everything ASOblick has ever collected already sits in a file on your Mac rather than on someone else’s computer. Nothing is deleted when a subscription lapses, and nothing has to be requested from anyone.