Directory
The app growth stack
Showing all 70 tools. Links checked 2026-09-01.
Subscriptions & payments
Receipt validation, entitlements and paywalls. StoreKit will do this itself; these exist because doing it yourself across two platforms and a web tier stops being a weekend job quickly.
Adapty
In-app purchase infrastructure with paywall A/B testing and subscription analytics.
Lemon Squeezy
Merchant of record for digital products and SaaS, handling sales tax compliance. For selling outside the App Store rather than inside it.
Nami
Subscription orchestration across mobile, web and connected TV, aimed at product and marketing teams.
Paddle
Merchant of record handling payments, tax and subscription billing for software companies.
Purchasely
No-code paywall building and A/B testing across the subscriber lifecycle.
Qonversion
Subscription back end for iOS, Android and web — paywalls, experiments and revenue tracking.
RevenueCat
In-app purchase and subscription infrastructure with cross-platform customer data. The default answer for most indie iOS subscription apps.
Superwall
Remotely configurable paywalls and monetization experiments, changed without shipping a build.
ASO & app intelligence
Keyword research, rank tracking, competitor and market data. Several of these compete with Appstro — they are here because a list that omits the competition is not a list worth reading.
App Radar
App store optimization and store listing management for iOS and Android.
Appbot
App review and rating analysis — sentiment, themes and alerting across stores and countries.
Appfigures
App intelligence and ASO — downloads and revenue estimates, keyword research and competitor tracking.
AppFollow
Review and rating management with reply automation, plus store visibility tracking.
AppTweak
ASO and Apple Search Ads platform — keyword research, rank tracking and market intelligence.
ASOdesk
App store optimization, review automation and competitor research for the App Store and Google Play.
MobileAction
App and game market intelligence with ad creative data and Apple Search Ads tooling.
Sensor Tower
Market intelligence — app download, revenue and ad spend estimates. The source behind the estimate figures shown on Appstro.
SplitMetrics
Apple Ads optimization and store page A/B testing, plus managed app growth services.
Attribution
Where an install came from. A mobile measurement partner is the only thing that joins ad spend to a download, which is why nothing on Appstro can answer that question.
AppsFlyer
Mobile measurement partner — install attribution, deep linking and marketing analytics.
Branch
Deep linking and mobile measurement. Often chosen for the linking half as much as the attribution.
Kochava
Omnichannel measurement for advertisers and publishers across mobile, web and CTV.
Singular
Marketing attribution combined with ad spend aggregation across networks.
Tenjin
Mobile marketing analytics and attribution, with a pay-as-you-grow model aimed at smaller teams.
Product analytics
What people do inside the app. Distinct from attribution, which is about how they arrived, and from App Store Connect, which stops at the download.
Amplitude
Product analytics — funnels, cohorts and retention across a user journey.
Aptabase
Open-source, privacy-first analytics for mobile and desktop apps. Self-hostable.
Countly
First-party analytics and engagement, available self-hosted or in a private cloud.
Fathom Analytics
Privacy-focused website analytics. For the marketing site rather than the app itself.
Firebase
Google’s app platform — analytics, remote config, messaging and more in one SDK. Note that adding it has App Privacy questionnaire consequences.
Mixpanel
Product analytics with session replay, experiments and feature flags.
Plausible
Lightweight open-source website analytics. Like Fathom, this is for the site, not the app.
PostHog
Open-source product analytics bundled with session replay, feature flags and experiments.
TelemetryDeck
Cookieless analytics built for Apple-platform apps. Popular with indie developers who want numbers without a tracking SDK.
Crashes & performance
Crash reports, error tracking and app performance in the field. Xcode Organizer covers some of this for free; these go further, and further back.
BugSnag
Error monitoring and application stability tracking.
Embrace
Real user monitoring for mobile, aimed at issues that never produce a crash log.
Emerge Tools
App size analysis, performance testing and build diffing on every pull request.
Firebase Crashlytics
Crash reporting for iOS, Android, Flutter and Unity, part of Firebase.
Luciqwas Instabug
Mobile bug reporting, crash reporting and in-app user feedback. Renamed from Instabug — the old domain redirects here.
Sentry
Error tracking and performance monitoring across platforms, with a self-hostable core.
Build & release
Continuous integration, signing, and getting a build to TestFlight without doing it by hand at midnight.
Appcircle
Mobile CI/CD with build, signing and distribution.
Bitrise
Mobile-focused CI/CD for iOS and Android with a large step library.
Codemagic
CI/CD for iOS, Android, Flutter and React Native projects.
fastlane
Open-source automation for building, signing, screenshotting and shipping. Underlies a lot of the hosted services in this group.
Runway
Release management — coordinating a mobile release across the people and steps involved in it.
Tuist
Xcode project generation and build infrastructure, aimed at keeping large projects manageable.
Xcode CloudApple
Apple’s own CI/CD, built into Xcode and wired directly to TestFlight and App Store Connect.
Screenshots & design
Store creative and the design tools behind it. Appstro can compare screenshots and generate them; these are what people use to design them in the first place.
AppLaunchpad
Browser-based App Store and Google Play screenshot generator with device frames and templates.
Figma
Collaborative interface design. Where most store creative is actually designed before it is exported.
Previewed
Mockup and store screenshot generator with 3D device scenes.
Rotato
Mac app for 3D device mockups and animated product video.
Screenshots Pro
Online App Store and Google Play screenshot set generator built from templates.
Sketch
Mac-native interface design, prototyping and developer handoff.
Localization
Translation management for the strings inside the app. Store listing copy is a separate job — see the localization tools on this site for that half.
Crowdin
Localization and translation management with integrations into source control and build.
Lokalise
Translation management for app and web strings, with iOS and Android format support.
Phrase
Localization platform aimed at larger multilingual content operations.
POEditor
Translation management system covering the common mobile string formats.
Transifex
Localization platform for software strings and content.
Push & lifecycle messaging
Push notifications, email and in-app messaging. Read Apple’s guidelines before automating any of it — permission prompts and marketing push are governed.
Braze
Customer engagement platform for cross-channel lifecycle messaging.
Courier
Notification infrastructure across push, email, SMS and chat behind one API.
Customer.io
Lifecycle messaging across email, push, SMS and in-app, driven by behavioural data.
Iterable
Cross-channel customer engagement with journey building.
OneSignal
Push notifications, in-app messaging, email and SMS. Common first choice for adding push without building the infrastructure.
Backend & sync
Somewhere to put the data. CloudKit is free with the developer programme and is the one most indie apps should rule out first, not last.
Appwrite
Open-source back end — database, auth, storage and functions. Self-hostable or hosted.
CloudKitApple
Apple’s own iCloud storage and sync, included with the developer programme. Worth ruling out first rather than last for an Apple-only app.
PocketBase
Open-source back end in a single file — realtime database, auth, file storage and an admin UI.
Supabase
Postgres with auth, storage, realtime and edge functions on top. What Appstro itself runs on.
Testing & distribution
Beta distribution and UI testing. TestFlight is free and is where most of this starts.
Maestro
End-to-end UI testing for mobile and web, with flows written in YAML.
TestFlightApple
Apple’s own beta distribution. Free, and where nearly every iOS beta programme starts.
XcodeApple
Apple’s development environment, including the test runner, Instruments and the Organizer’s crash and metric reports.
Support & feedback
Talking to users somewhere other than the App Store review section, which is the worst support channel ever built.
Comparisons
Shortlists for one decision at a time. No scores and no rankings — see each page for why.
- App Store optimization tools, compared9 tools
- RevenueCat alternatives8 tools
- App analytics tools, compared7 tools
- App Store screenshot tools, compared6 tools
- Mobile attribution platforms, compared5 tools
- Crash and error monitoring, compared6 tools
- Mobile CI/CD, compared7 tools
- App localization tools, compared5 tools
- Push and lifecycle messaging, compared5 tools
- Backends for an iOS app, compared4 tools
Building something for iOS developers?
Submissions are free and a listing is free. Send the link and one sentence about what it does. It will be checked the same way everything above was, and listed if it is genuinely useful to the people who read this site.
Being listed is not for sale, and neither is position — the order within a group is alphabetical. If you want a labelled sponsor placement on top of the editorial listing, that is on the advertising page.
How this list is maintained
Every URL was fetched and answered before it was added, most recently on 2026-09-01. Anything that could not be verified was dropped rather than guessed — at the last sweep that meant three candidates, including one whose domain had lapsed and now serves a gambling page under a former SDK’s name.
There are no prices, free-tier limits or customer counts here, because those move and a stale figure is worse than no figure. There is no score and no ranking: order within a group is alphabetical, and several of the ASO tools listed compete with Appstro directly.
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