Filed under: iPod Family, Developer, iPhone, App Store, SDK, Jailbreak/pwnage
iPhone developers on the go can retrieve App Store reports with AppSales Mobile
Are you an App Store developer? Are you looking to keep track of how your applications are doing from the convenience of your iPhone? The open source AppSales Mobile application has made a place for itself in the developer community, offering up-to date statistics with daily and weekly reports from the iTunes app store. You'll need a developer license to run it, however, as it's not available in the App Store. You must download the source, compile it in Xcode, and install it onto your iPhone.AppSales Mobile offers an easy-to-use settings page. Just enter your iTunes Connect user ID and password and choose the currency you want to work with (this defaults to the euro, so US devs will probably want to change it to dollars). Return to the main menu and click the refresh button. If you've got a solid network connection, your reports will download in a matter of minutes.
From there, you can choose to view your daily or weekly reports, or view app sales graphs. Be warned that graphs only apply to paid applications. As all my software is currently free, my graphs errorred out with Not-a-Number (NaN) results. The screen shot at the top of this post comes from the application information page and not from my testing.
It's likely that this application was originally meant for the App Store but was unable to pass the hurdles of the Apple review team (the bug tracker for the app notes that there is no official API for iTunes Connect, which may be the reason). As AppSales Mobile proves, open source can provide another distribution channel for apps otherwise cut off from the App Store. The application uses Apple's Piano interface to download sales data.
AppSales Mobile remains in active development with regular updates and it keeps improving. The buzz from the developer community is consistently positive. If I have any complaint, it is that I would much prefer a tool that ran natively on Macintosh and Windows computers. The Mac version of AppSales is, sadly, no longer in active development. The Mobile AppSales developer points to ideaswarm's AppViz as a Mac-based alternative.
AppSales, which was developed by omz:software, is hosted at Google Code and mirrored at github. It is donationware.
Gallery: Mobile AppSales
Update: It looks like at least one application (iTunes Link) made it past those App Store reviewers. (Thanks M.H.)
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Josh Monroe said 5:40PM on 6-03-2009
I have been using this for almost two months to track my sales and I love it.
Reply
drops said 5:48PM on 6-03-2009
I am the maker of yet another mobile report downloading app and my customers tell me that mine is better/faster/nicer than the app mentioned in this article.
http://www.drobnik.com/touch/my-app-sales/
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ramond said 6:15PM on 6-03-2009
I use AppSales mobile every day it rocks. AppViz is alright but I prefer checking sales from my phone when I wake up.
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JBeatty said 7:36PM on 6-03-2009
I too submitted an application that accessed data via iTunes connect. I thought it would be permitted as both:
CXI Gaming - Sales tracker
and
Marigo Holdings LLC - Sales Report
use the same functionality to access data and report to the phone.
This was Apples response:
"Thank you for submitting your application to the App Store. Unfortunately, your application, AppStatus, cannot be added to the App Store because it violates section 3.3.7 of the iPhone SDK Agreement:
"Applications may not use any robot, spider, site search or other retrieval application or device to scrape, retrieve or index services provided by Apple or its licensors, or to collect information about users for any unauthorized purpose. "
There is no public API allowing information from iTunes Connect to be used in the manner demonstrated by your application."
Guess I failed to read that part of the SDK agreement...
As an iPhone developer I can live with the difficulty one might experience getting an application accepted, but I feel singled out as they are clearly inconsistent with the approval process. Hope I am one of the 'lucky' ones on the next app I build...or perhaps its time to move on.
J.
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iData said 3:52PM on 6-05-2009
Welcome back Erica
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