AppMagic Review: App Market Intelligence Tool

When you're a founder or business leader building an app, keeping tabs on your market is useful. This article gives an unbiased review of AppMagic, it's pros and cons and how you can run some useful reports. 

What should you know about your market? 

When planning your mobile app, you might have a lot of questions. For example:

• How many people might download your app (Total Addressable Market)
• Who are your competitors?
• What downloads and revenue to they have?
• What features do they offer?
• Who are the newcomers?
• Who are the rising stars?
• What's happening in other countries?

The list goes on. All this can be useful when shaping your mobile strategy and figuring out exactly what app to build or where to focus next.

You don't have to do this to create a great app, but it can just give you a little more insight and prevent you from building app features that may not have an audience.

What are app market intelligence tools?

Over the last few years, I've been checking out tools that help with understanding the market.

App market intelligence tools provide real-time insight into the data and trends of the mobile app market. They are designed to help you make more informed decisions about which apps to build, what features to include, how your app compares against the competition, and so on. With these insights, you can refine your mobile strategy for maximum success.

Here's a few I've looked at:

• MobileAction
• SensorTower
• 42Matters
• ASOMobile
• Mobbo
• Data.ai

Figuring out which is best has been a bit painful; you have to speak to the salespeople at each company and sometimes the trials aren't as useful as you'd think.

I'll talk more about those tools in another post, but for now, let's get back to AppMagic. 

So, how can AppMagic help you?

You might have overlooked AppMagic because it seems to be aimed at the gaming market. However, it's actually quite a capable app intelligence tool for the apps market too. Here are a few examples of how I'm using it.

Let's say you're building an app for people suffering panic attacks.

Find competitor apps

You could use the advanced search to find competitor apps that: 

• have the word panic in the app title or description
• are available in the UK
• are in the Health and Fitness category

Here are the results:

Spot Checks

From here, you can now go and spot check apps to see their features and relevance. 

Being able to browse the marketing images and description quickly is a good way to understand the features. 

Understand your Total Addressable Market

I've been using the competitor analysis lists to curate a report and see the total addressable market. 

You create a new analysis, and then manually add the apps to the report. This allows you to see the apps with the top downloads and revenue in the regions of your choice. 

This is a good indicator of TAM. 

You can also see trends over time, so you can see how apps are rising and falling in download or revenue.

Slack notifications

If you want to learn about new competitors or spikes in competitor downloads as they happen, then you can enable Slack notifications. This is quite a sophisticated feature with a lot of personalisation options. 

Here's how it looks when you receive an alert:

A few other cool things

• It has an API which seems pretty comprehensive
• The trending report is pretty awesome, seeing who's on the rise in any particular country or category. You can even filter just to see UK app publishers, for example.

Pros & Cons

Pros

• Kirill,the sales guy, was super chill and helpful
• Price is good, you can get quite a lot for $400 a month, price goes up to $1000 a month max for 1 seat; a lot cheaper than AppFigures $3K+ a month market intelligence tool
• The one week full trial is brilliant
• The UI is super-fast
• It has a decent JSON REST API
• You can download CSV
• The UK data is surprisingly accurate for the apps we manage (we haven't shared data with them)
• The tag classification is more detailed than overall app store categories
• You can suggest edits to their tag classification

Cons

• The UI is a bit complicated, like most of these tools
• Multi-user feels a bit weird, there's no concept of an organsiation account
• Not all apps are "universal", meaning sometimes you have to look at Android and iOS separately 
• No ASO, but we use AppFigures for that which is very capable
• No analysis of user reviews
• No app update frequency in API or in the UI

Suggestions

• UX: Would be useful if you could open app info as an overlay OR in a new window
• UX: Allow me to filter by UK and Health and Fitness at global level, rather than on each screen
• Data Quality: Allow us to suggest app groupings where the same iOS and Android app isn't already a universal one
• Convenience: Allow us to add any app to a comparison report from anywhere
• Data Quality: Allow us to add user tags to data, so we can tag for our own studies
• Convenience: Be great if the API exported app update frequency
• Data Quality: Would be great if it included review analysis

It's a wrap

Hopefully this is useful to you. Check out AppMagic and let me know what you think in the comments below.