I’ve been building apps for a long time. Long enough to remember when checking your stats meant logging into iTunes Connect and squinting at a table that hadn’t changed its layout in years. Long enough to remember celebrating a good week, then opening the dashboard the next day and having no idea whether it was still going well or quietly falling apart.
That feeling — not knowing what’s actually happening with your app — is what eventually made me build AppCherish.
The thing nobody talks about
There’s a version of the indie developer story that goes: you ship the app, users come, and then you watch the numbers go up. That part is real. But the part that comes after is less glamorous: you’re staring at a graph, unsure if what you’re seeing is a trend or noise. You’re comparing this week to last week but not sure if that’s even the right comparison. You’re watching downloads tick up and wondering why your revenue didn’t.
App Store Connect gives you the raw data. What it doesn’t give you is interpretation. And as a solo developer — or even a small team — you don’t always have the bandwidth to build that interpretation yourself.
I spent years trying to fill that gap. I built spreadsheets. I set up automations to pull data into Notion. I wrote little scripts that would email me summaries. None of it stuck, because maintaining it was a second job, and the moment I’d miss a week of updates, the whole system would feel unreliable.
What AppCherish actually is
AppCherish connects to App Store Connect via Apple’s official APIs and gives you a clear, unified view of how your apps are doing — without you having to piece it together yourself.
You connect your account once, and from that point AppCherish pulls in your downloads, revenue, subscription metrics, ratings, and store performance data and organises it into something readable. You can see how each app is trending over time, how your subscription renewals and cancellations are behaving, where your users are coming from, and how your App Store page is converting.
Beyond the standard metrics, AppCherish watches for meaningful patterns and surfaces them as insights — things like a dip in renewal rate, a spike in redownloads, a territory where your app is quietly gaining traction, or a conversion drop that might point to a creative asset that’s gone stale. These aren’t alerts you configure. They’re just there when they’re relevant, and absent when they’re not.
It’s designed for developers who have one app or a handful of apps, who want to stay informed without becoming analysts, and who’d rather spend their time building than interpreting dashboards. You don’t need to know what to look for — AppCherish tells you when something is worth your attention.
Any app, no login required
One thing I’m particularly happy with is the public insights page. Every app on the App Store has a free, publicly accessible page on AppCherish — no account needed. You can look up any app by name and see a snapshot of how it’s performing: its ratings history, review trends, pricing, and a few key signals about its store presence.
It’s useful if you’re doing competitor research, evaluating an app category before building in it, or just curious about how a particular app is doing. It’s also a good way to see what AppCherish surfaces before committing to anything.
I wanted this to exist because I think transparency is undervalued in the analytics space. Not every useful insight requires a subscription — and if AppCherish can save someone ten minutes of manual research, that’s worthwhile on its own.
Why the existing tools didn’t work for me
There are analytics tools out there. Some of them are genuinely impressive in scope. But most of them were built for a different kind of user — someone who wants to build dashboards, configure data pipelines, and spend meaningful time inside a tool every day.
That’s not me. I want to open something, understand what’s happening with my apps, and get back to building. I don’t want to configure anything. I don’t want to learn a new query language or figure out what a chart is trying to tell me.
The tools I tried either gave me too much — endless customization, dozens of chart types, setup that took hours — or too little — just a slightly nicer skin on the same raw tables from App Store Connect. Neither felt like they were actually on my side.
What I wanted instead
I had a clear picture in my head of what I actually wanted. Something that connected to my App Store data, understood what mattered, and surfaced meaningful signals without asking me to configure anything. Something I could check in two minutes and trust that if there was something worth knowing, it would be there. And if there wasn’t, I could close it and move on.
I wanted it to be calm. Not designed to keep me inside it. Not optimized to make me feel like I needed to check it every hour.
I also wanted it to work for how I actually run my apps — which is to say, mostly by myself, across a few different products, without a team of analysts to help me make sense of the data.
That’s what I tried to build.
What AppCherish became
I started AppCherish as something I was building for myself. It took a while to get to a point where it actually did what I wanted — connecting to App Store Connect properly, surfacing the right signals, staying out of the way when there was nothing worth surfacing.
At some point I showed it to a few developer friends. The feedback I kept hearing was: “this is what I’ve been looking for.” Not because it was impressive in scope, but because it was calm and clear and didn’t ask anything of them.
That’s when I decided to make it a real product.
Building it has been its own education. Thinking carefully about which metrics matter and which ones are just noise. Figuring out what “a meaningful signal” actually means in practice. Learning that less is almost always more — that cutting a feature you thought was useful but that nobody needed is as important as shipping one that is.
The honest version
I built AppCherish because I was frustrated. Because I’d spent years checking dashboards that left me more confused than when I opened them. Because I wanted something that treated my time as finite and my attention as valuable.
I don’t think analytics should be something you have to study to use. I don’t think you should need to build a system on top of your data just to understand what’s happening with your app.
AppCherish is my answer to that. It’s still evolving — there’s a lot I want to add and improve. But the core of it has stayed the same since the beginning: give developers clarity, not complexity.
If that resonates with you, it might be worth trying.