As developers, we always struggled to keep up on our apps in the app store. iTunes Connect just seemed inadequate, and accessing reviews and rankings through the iTunes browser was too slow and limited. It was like driving blindfolded — we had no answers to important questions such as where our apps were popular and what their highest rankings were.

Our solution was to create a tracking tool that automatically captured, aggregated, and visualized the data already available so we could see simple facts as well as more subtle trends. The tool has been so useful to us that we’ve decided to share it with the app development community.

We're happy to finally release App Annie in to the wild, and hope to get lots of feedback from other app developers. Here’s a quick summary of what she’s geared with out of the box:

• An "App Care" section that sports iTunes Connect integration with comprehensive reports on sales as well as rankings and reviews.
• A "Store Stats" section that contains all ranking information on all stores in all categories, visualized in comprehensive top 500 charts and unique at-a-glance graphical top 5 matrices, all armed with a variety of filtering options.

Whether you use App Annie to track your apps or to research the app store, we're sure that you will, as we did, find many interesting, quirky, and occasionally important patterns in the data. Please, share these discoveries with us, and don't forget to be liberal with your feedback on the site!

App Annie will be free for the duration of this open beta, but we do plan to eventually make "App Care" a premium subscription service. We expect the beta to last 6-12 weeks.

Be sure to subscribe to this blog and the "Ask Annie" newsletter to get updates on interesting analysis and research for the app store. And, if you have something you’re wondering about, feel free to use the site to ask Annie yourself.

Enjoy the site!
The AppAnnie Team, & App Annie herself