Show HN: Find profitable niche in App Store and Google Play Market

Hi,

This is my brand new project which helps indie iOS/Android devs discover the most profitable phrase niches in Apple App Store and Google Play Market for their apps and monitor position of their apps in markets.

Please give me your feedback :)

Regards, Wiktor

Show HN: Find profitable niche in App Store and Google Play Market
appsleak.com

I'm used to playing the "UK, United Kingdom, Great Britain, England..." guessing game in drop down lists but putting "United Kingdom" in between Gabon and Grenada is a new one. I'd almost given up looking by that point.

(Presumably the list is sorted by country code.)

I'm a founder and CEO at MobileDevHQ[1], a startup focused on App Store optimization. We have been doing this work for almost a year and a half now and have built powerful tools for understanding the App Store, including keyword research and market/niche finders.

Appsleak looks interesting, congrats on launching! The app ecosystem needs more tools to help it mature and advance.

To those of you interested in understanding markets/niches and keywords in the app stores, it is important to note a couple main points:

First, there are large differences between Google/other web search volume and search volume in the App Store. At MobileDevHQ, we do lots of work to uncover those differences and provide realistic pictures of what is happening in the app stores themselves. For example, the volume on Google for "puzzles" likely has little relation to the volume in the app stores.

Also, competition as defined by number of search results is a great start to understanding the difficulty it will take for you to rank highly for a particular term, but it doesn't go far enough. At the end of the day, it is not just about number of results, but also the factors that the app stores use to rank results, and how "entrenched" those factors are in current results. You can only begin to understand this with lots of data, which is why we have been collecting this for years now and have even released a tool we call Sonar to help developers and marketers understand when an App Store changes its search algorithm.

There are tons of things I could riff on about App Store search, but those are the 2 most common thigs I see people missing, so I wanted to make sure I mentioned those in particular.

[1] http://www.mobiledevhq.com

Thanks for the interesting tool.

Perhaps a couple of examples (from the time of writing) of niches you've identified with it would be helpful to first-time visitors?

I know there's the slideshow on the homepage, but after putting a search phrase in there's nothing that immediately grabs me and makes me think "wow that's a big opportunity". Perhaps it's just me being mostly ignorant of the mobile market, but it's some honest feedback.

There's a typo in the App Store/Play headings ("Competiton").

We do a lot of crawling various data sources. We spent over 3 years building a really great infrastructure to do this well. This is how we can present rank tracking for you and your competitors over time. The last time I checked, I think the number was actually over 500k... I should update that page!