AppViz review

We've discovered a lot about the environment that App developers exist in, and while Apple clearly does a heck of a lot for developers, its iTunes Connect web reporting software leaves an awful lot to be desired. For the uninitiated: iTunes Connect is the Apple service you use to manage all the apps that you've created for iTunes. Apple also provides Sales and Trends reports, which provides information on daily, weekly, and monthly sales; plus monthly revenue and information on free app downloads.

While the information Apple provides is detailed, it's pretty tricky to decipher, coming in pure Excel-style chart format that mixes up sales from multiple territories and currencies in the same sheets. This can make it difficult to keep track of sales, because before you can get a good overview of what's going on, you have to crunch the numbers into workable charts (in Excel or Numbers)

AppViz takes the strain off you by accessing iTunes Connect, downloading all the latest reports, and generating nicely visual charts and graphs (alongside more generic tabular information) so you check progress.

The App is split into two sections, Rankings and Accounts. In Rankings you can view graphs and tabular information for historical chart rankings of apps. You can view data from each individual country, break it down into overall charts or charts from specific sections (news, games, entertainment, and so on). You can also break down information from Paid, Free, and Top Grossing charts.

By default, iTunes Connect provides data on apps charting within the top 200 positions. AppViz also integrates with Applyzer to provide information on rankings within the top 2000 positions, so it's good for all the lower-key apps that developers still want information on. It's also good for developers outside the top 200 of all apps, but who still want to see how they're doing in the wider scheme of things

The second part of AppViz is the Connect Account information. This pulls the data from iTunes Connect for Sales, Revenue, Upgrades and Downloads. There is a Dashboard that provides a quick overview of how your apps are doing, and detailed Graphs for Sales, Trend and Geography (a rather nice map that shows how well you're doing in each area). You can also access the reports as they are detailed in iTunes Connect.

One particularly nice touch is that you can access user reviews for all your apps in one place.

There are some export options, although it's slightly disappointing that you can only export data, rather than output the graphs and charts to PDF documents. Apart from that we find AppViz to be a pretty essential app for any developer.