Building @applyra - ASO tool for indie devs 📲 Helping apps rank higher on App Store & Google Play. Indie hacker · Building in public
France
Joined October 2012
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I spent months building an ASO tool that indie devs can actually afford.
Most ASO tools charge $65 to $2,000+/mo.
I built @applyra for $9.99/mo. With a free plan.
Here's what it does and why I built it 🧵
I scored 12,000 App Store listings.
→ 7 in 10 put a keyword in their title that much bigger apps already own.
→ Almost 1 in 4 repeat title words in the subtitle, which Apple only counts once.
Both are fixable before you ship. Here’s the tool I built for it:
Why before: a keyword that enters your title gains 22 positions on iOS the same day the listing goes live. One that leaves costs you 18, just as fast.
Every metadata update is a live experiment on your rankings. Better to run it on a draft first.
Metadata Simulator: paste a title, subtitle and keywords field (or a Google Play listing), get a score out of 100, every wasted word flagged, and what App Store Connect would refuse caught before review.
10 free runs a month:
applyra.io/docs/tools/metada…
Google Play changed its search algorithm 3 times in 10 days.
14, 16 and 23 September, in almost every market at once. The App Store didn’t move.
Google announced nothing. We measured it every day. Here’s what happened:
Full breakdown, every market, what to do this week:
applyra.io/blog/google-play-…
Free detector, both stores, every country we cover, no signup: applyra.io/tools/algorithm-c…
On Monday, 51% of the Google Play keywords we measure in the US moved 10 places or more.
A normal day is 4%.
Google said nothing, as usual. So here is what actually happened.
It stuck. 9 out of 10 positions that moved were still within 2 places of their new rank 24h later.
So do not panic-ship metadata. A release re-triggers indexing and you lose the only clean before/after you had.
Wait two or three days, read the new level, then decide.
I track this daily on both stores, per country, and publish it free with no account.
The 14 September page:
applyra.io/tools/algorithm-c…
Every number above, with the method:
applyra.io/blog/google-play-…
Ask any LLM which keywords your app should target and it answers from training data. You get the head terms you will never win.
Give it your live ASO data over MCP and the same question returns difficulty, traffic score, where you rank today, and where your rivals rank.
That is the actual shift. Not chat instead of a dashboard, but the model reasoning over your real numbers.
"Target this keyword" becomes "you are already #14 here, difficulty 29, and your closest rival does not rank for it at all".
Setup and the prompts I run every Monday:
applyra.io/blog/agentic-aso-…
20 tools, works with Claude, Cursor, Codex, VS Code:
applyra.io/features/mcp-serv…
