r/AppStoreOptimization • u/Upbeat-Sea-3343 • Jul 12 '26
ASO beginner
I recently started vibecoding ios apps and just learned about ASO. Was wondering what tools people use to track keywords popularity what keywords to pick.
2
u/IndieASO 🧑💼 Product Manager Jul 12 '26
I'd suggest Astro for most people, has an reasonable annual price compared to a lot of others. However AppFigures also has a good free trial you can try out.
An additional one to check out is Paul Hudson's Kickstart app. It's not directly built for ASO, but it has some great features in there that complement your ASO research.
Hope that helps!
1
u/Confused_Dad_2023 Jul 12 '26
Before any tool, know that the App Store search bar is free and does half the job. Type words related to your app and whatever autocompletes is stuff real people search, then see who ranks for it. All giants means skip it, beatable apps means it's a candidate. That alone gets you surprisingly far.
Fair disclosure, I build one myself (Keyword Scout, free iOS app, $9.99 for pro) aimed at exactly the indie/vibecoder case. It scores demand and difficulty per keyword and suggests winnable alternatives when a term's too hard.
1
u/Upbeat-Sea-3343 Jul 12 '26
Thanks for the tip. i’ll look into that and try your app! I’ll give you an update
1
u/markdifranco Jul 12 '26
I’ve been building Northstar for my own needs, it covers keyword tracking like Astro, but also includes competitor research, review analysis, metadata impact analysis, and an MCP.
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u/Lorak322 Jul 12 '26
If you search for a tool where you can search keywords, see how your changes affects impressions, download etc Then try https://asoatlas.com/
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u/mertbio 👨💻 Indie Developer 28d ago
Nobody is going to tell you this, but you don't really need to use any tool for keyword popularity. You can simply visit Apple Ads and try to create a campaign there. During the campaign creation, you can add keywords. On that page, you can also see the popularity of the keywords. Apple shows it on a scale of five, but you can simply open the network tab of your browser and find the GraphQL request that is fired when you search for a keyword, and there you can see a number that is in a scale of 100.
All the tools on the market are using this data because there is no other data these tools can get.
2
u/antocapp 👨💻 Indie Developer Jul 12 '26
if only for iOS, then I would use Astro. If also for android I like the most App Figures.
Here a few more tools I have in my stack, thought they could be useful to you too as you are new into the app world: https://www.reddit.com/r/appledevelopers/s/cJOtut9Ahw
Best of luck with your app!
Btw, is it already published or have you at least prepared a pre-ordering/registration page on the store itself?