Taking Control of AppStore Reporting With AppViz

Like the majority of Apple products and solutions, Apple’s App Store is sleek in its presentation to the consumer. However, one of the less polished aspects is the developer back end, iTunes Connect. Don’t get me wrong, this is functional, but it’s not targeted at the consumer market and as such it just does the necessary job without any of the usual Apple polish.

While you can get email notification of the availability of official monthly reports, it is up to you to open your browser and log into the web page. There you can view and download daily, weekly and monthly sales reports by using a basic user interface that lets you manually select one file (raw text data files) at a time to download. You can then take this raw data and do any fancy data analysis that you require with software such as Excel or Numbers.

Thus a new market has been created for applications to assist businesses in taking control of their App Store reporting. As a lone independent App Store developer I wanted to find such an application that would provide a ‘one-stop’ place to enable me to appraise the performance of my applications.

AppViz, by ideaswarm is this application. To get the best appreciation of what this application has to offer, a glance at the Dashboard tab presented on launch tells the story.

The Dashboard gives you an excellent summary of your state of play, enabling you to quickly see totals, charts and trends on sales, revenue, upgrades and downloads for one or all of your applications. After installing AppViz you simply provide it with your iTunes Connect username and password and it can do the rest. When you want to see the latest stats, you just fire AppViz up, tap Command-i and it will go off any find any new sales reports for all your applications. You can also import any reports you have already saved to disk directly from file if you have them.

The Dashboard provides a great summary, but if you would really like to dig down to specific data, the Graphs tab gives you the power to do so, allowing graphing Sales or Geography (with a map and pie chart), Revenue, Downloads and Upgrades by any date range and country.

To see the original individual Apple provided reports all nicely presented in a grid that can be sorted, the Reports tab gives you an easy user interface to access it all. If you do want to do your own manipulation of the raw data, AppViz has an Export function to write these original reports out as a file for loading into a spreadsheet.

Finally, AppViz can download App Store reviews from all iTunes stores. This lets you easily stay on top of your App?s user feedback. If a user edits their review, AppViz will update it accordingly too. Being able to sort the reviews by the date that they were downloaded just makes it too easy to see what?s new at a glance.

AppViz is $29.95 and a free 30 day trial is available. I?m currently half way through my trial and have been extremely impressed by the functional utility provided, letting me focus my time on more enjoyable things. In the 15 days that I?ve trailed so far, AppViz has had two updates (provided by way of the standard Check For Updates menu option) and is in rapid development, taking note of comments from existing customers. I?m looking forward to seeing what other great timesaving functionality will be included in the future.

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