problem

Back in the early days of smartphones, app markets were the wild west as far as getting exposure for your app was concerned. The markets would tell you how to list an app, but no one could say what drove app rankings. App market tracking companies like App Annie and Distimo were just getting off the ground, and if you wanted to use either solution you had to hand over your app listing login criteria, along with a bunch of revenue info. Symantec wanted to keep track of app performance, but as an enterprise security company we weren’t about to hand over our developer credentials to get the information.

solution

I created the concept, outlined requirements, oversaw the design and development of an in-house app market intelligence tool. We used publicly available data to monitor changes in app rankings and keep track of changes to app listings.

data

We tracked publicly available data points over time, including:

• App listing title

• Rank

• App listing edits and app updates

• Ratings

• Keywords of ratings

insights

It was really interesting to watch how changes in the data correlated to the rank of a tracked app. We pretty quickly reverse-engineered the ranking algorithm and used this to optimize our own app listing. It also became a great tool for the mobile product management team to reference around customer feedback.