So you may recall that up until now we’ve been quite pleased with the daily email reports from AppFigures.com — but OH NOES! they’ve decided they actually want to make us pay for it now: $5 + $1.50 per app over two … per month.
Hmmm. While we suppose it wouldn’t actually bankrupt us, that is going to mount up, especially if you want to track various free, promotional, etc. versions as well as apps people are actually paying for. In addition, as well as reporting to people that we’re publishing on behalf of, there’s also the situation of being paid through royalties for things published by other people, in which we’d like to specify a daily reporting method … but insisting on a paid service is likely to cause unnecessary friction there. Very likely, in fact.
So we had a little wander around the web, and although we found a few new little tidbits to update our exhaustive sales tool list with, there still does not seem to be any tool other than AppFigures that will let you schedule daily email reports.
Sooooo, since we much prefer to keep our financial information and iTunes Connect passwords on our machine and out of the cloud anyways — it’s time to roll our own! And looks like the only two fairly full-featured (by which we mean, ‘scrapes iTunes Connect on its own’) starting points we see are both iPhone applications:
1. AppSales Mobile — on Google Code, moving to github — New BSD License
2. My App Sales — $15 for source — no commercial use
Not that we have any current plans to actually make any kind of commercial offering to compete with the existing solutions, but just in case the desire ever arises, we’ll start by checking out the AppSales Mobile code and see about scarfing what it does for a desktop daemon. If it turns out that everything we need isn’t there — although it looks like it is — then we’ll check out this other product.
Any other options to suggest, Dear Readers?
JUL