Apple has introduced a new way for developers on platforms like the iPhone to track the performance of their apps. This is a new dashboard called Peer Group Benchmarks that shows percentile data for how your app compares to other similar apps on specific metrics.
The new dashboard will appear within App Analytics, a tool already available as part of App Store Connect. This is Apple’s portal to his suite of services that developers can use to manage their apps in Apple’s various app stores.
Metrics tracked in the dashboard include conversion rate, revenue per paying user, crash rate, and retention. They are all displayed in weekly intervals. According to a developer support document published by Apple, Apple automatically classifies apps into peer groups based on his three criteria.
First, the app is sorted with other apps listed in the same App Store category.
Among them, it is sorted with other apps with similar business models. The business models defined by Apple for this purpose are Free, Freemium, Paid, Paymium, and Subscription.
Freemium apps are apps that are free to download but have in-app purchases. Premium apps are apps that are sold on a prepaid basis. The Paymium app has both prepaid purchase pricing and in-app purchases. A subscription app is one that derives 50% or more of its revenue from auto-renewable subscriptions.
Finally, compare your app to other apps with similar download volumes. Based on the other criteria above, Apple categorizes apps into low, medium, or high download volume groups based on the number of times each app has been downloaded compared to other similar apps, where We have not been more specific about the calculation of .
Apple did not invent this concept of peer group benchmarking. This kind of comparison has long been available in third-party premium analytics services marketed to app developers.
However, unlike these services, developers don’t have to pay more than Apple’s annual developer account fee to access this data. Granted, it’s definitely not as robust as what you get from its rivals, but it could be a welcome feature, especially for smaller and growing developers. Technically, it might represent the entirety of all apps in the App Store, but third-party solutions might work with less comprehensive data sets.
Apple claims that data released to other developers for comparison is anonymized. Only aggregated data is displayed, so developers cannot get an accurate picture of how a particular competitor is performing.
