Appfigures vs a portfolio dashboard for mobile-first indies

From the SoleOS answers series — written about our own product space; grounded in published definitions and documented behavior, never invented numbers.

Appfigures is built for app store analytics — rankings, reviews, keyword tracking, ASO — and it does that job well for a single app or a handful of them. A portfolio dashboard covers different ground: revenue and subscriber data from RevenueCat or Stripe, web analytics, and signals from your backend, all rolled up across every product you run. For a mobile-first indie, the honest answer is: you probably want store-level detail from a tool like Appfigures and a revenue/retention view that spans your whole portfolio — the question is whether you need both, or whether one covers enough of your actual decisions.

What Appfigures is actually good at

Appfigures started as an ASO and app intelligence tool, and that's still its center of gravity. If your job this week is "why did we drop from #12 to #40 in the Photo & Video category" or "which keywords are competitors ranking for that we're not," Appfigures is purpose-built for that. It aggregates App Store Connect and Google Play data, tracks keyword rankings over time, pulls in reviews and ratings across territories, and gives you competitor visibility that neither App Store Connect nor Play Console offer natively.

That's a real, specific job. If your growth lever is organic store discovery — keyword optimization, screenshot testing, review response — Appfigures earns its subscription on that alone.

Where it stops being enough

The gap shows up the moment your question isn't "how are we ranking" but "how is the business doing." Appfigures reports downloads and store-side revenue estimates, but it isn't built to reconcile that against your actual subscriber ledger in RevenueCat, or your Stripe revenue if you sell web subscriptions alongside the app, or your web funnel in GA4 and Search Console. A mobile-first indie rarely runs only mobile — there's usually a landing page, maybe a web app, maybe a companion SaaS product. Store analytics tools don't stitch that together, and they're not supposed to.

The other gap is portfolio scale. Appfigures lets you track multiple apps, but it's still fundamentally an app-by-app view — rankings per app, reviews per app. It doesn't answer "which of my 8 apps is actually worth my time this quarter" because that question needs revenue trend, retention, and traffic side by side, normalized so you can compare a $400 MRR utility app against a $2,000 MRR subscription app on the same axes.

If you've ever tried to reconcile RevenueCat and Stripe numbers by hand, you already know how much manual work sits between "store data" and "an actual portfolio view" — see tracking Stripe and RevenueCat together for what that reconciliation actually involves.

What a portfolio dashboard adds

A portfolio dashboard like SoleOS connects to RevenueCat and Stripe for revenue and subscriber metrics, GA4 and Search Console (and Bing Webmaster) for web traffic and search visibility, and App Store Connect and Google Play directly for store-side metrics — plus Firebase and Supabase for backend signals. The point isn't to replace ASO tooling; it's to put revenue, retention, traffic, and store performance for every product you run on one screen, so you're not tab-switching between five dashboards to decide where to spend your next week.

Disclosure: SoleOS is written about here as SoleOS's own blog, so weigh that. We're describing what the category does, not claiming it's objectively better than a dedicated ASO tool — for keyword-level store optimization, Appfigures (or similar) is still the more specialized tool.

Where a portfolio view earns its keep is the recurring decision every solo founder with more than one product has to make: which app gets attention this month. That decision needs revenue trend + retention + traffic, side by side, across all your products — not deep keyword history for one app at a time. If you want to see what that actually looks like with real numbers instead of hypotheticals, real numbers from a 10-app portfolio walks through it.

When you don't need this at all

If you run one or two apps and your growth is almost entirely organic store discovery — no web funnel to speak of, no Stripe subscriptions, revenue tracked fine in RevenueCat's own dashboard — a dedicated ASO tool plus RevenueCat's native reporting is genuinely enough. Adding a portfolio dashboard on top of that is overhead you don't need yet. The tipping point is usually when you cross 3-4 products, or when revenue starts coming from more than one source (store + web checkout), or when you're spending real time each week manually copying numbers between tabs to decide what to work on.

If you're not sure which side of that line you're on, a spreadsheet is a reasonable middle step — see SoleOS vs a spreadsheet for a free template and an honest breakdown of where spreadsheets start to creak.

How to decide for your situation

Ask three questions:

1. Is store discovery (rankings, keywords, reviews) your main growth lever, or one of several? If it's the main one, weight toward Appfigures or a similar ASO-focused tool.
2. Do you sell through more than one channel — app store IAP plus a web checkout, or multiple apps with different monetization models? If yes, you need something that normalizes revenue across sources, which store analytics tools don't do.
3. How many products are you actually deciding between each week? One or two apps, store data alone might answer your questions. Five, ten, fifteen — you need a rollup, because manually checking each app's dashboard doesn't scale and you'll quietly stop doing it.

For a broader look at what "portfolio intelligence" actually needs to cover — signals versus dashboards, what counts as a metric versus a nudge — see the metrics dictionary for exact formulas and caveats, and what SoleOS connects to if you want to check scopes before connecting anything.

If you want to see the shape of a multi-product rollup without committing to anything, the live demo uses sample data and needs no sign-up. Pricing for SoleOS itself is at SoleOS pricing — plans start at $19/month for up to 5 projects, scaling to $79/month for up to 40, with a 7-day trial.

Frequently asked questions

Can I use Appfigures and a portfolio dashboard together?

Yes, and for a lot of mobile-first indies that's the actual right setup. Use Appfigures (or a similar ASO tool) for keyword tracking, ranking history, and review management — the store-discovery layer. Use a portfolio dashboard for the roll-up view: revenue and retention from RevenueCat/Stripe, web traffic from GA4/Search Console, and store metrics pulled in alongside everything else, so you can compare products on the same axes without re-deriving it manually each week.

Does Appfigures show revenue, or just downloads and rankings?

Appfigures does show revenue estimates sourced from the app stores, and for apps that only monetize through store IAP without a subscriber platform, that can be enough. It gets less complete once you're using RevenueCat for subscription management (which has its own definitions of trials, entitlements, and churn) or selling through Stripe on the web — those numbers live in their own systems and don't automatically reconcile with store-reported figures.

What's the actual difference between a "dashboard" and an ASO tool like Appfigures?

An ASO tool is optimized for discovery mechanics — where you rank, what keywords work, what reviews say. A portfolio dashboard is optimized for the business-level view across products: is revenue growing, is retention holding, is traffic trending up or down, and how does each product compare to the others. They answer different questions, and a mobile-first founder running several apps often genuinely needs both, just for different tasks.

I only have 2 apps. Do I need a portfolio dashboard?

Probably not yet. With 2 apps and no web-based revenue channel, checking each app's native dashboards (App Store Connect, Play Console, RevenueCat) weekly is manageable by hand. The value of a rollup grows with the number of products and the number of separate revenue sources you're stitching together — measure how much time you spend manually cross-checking numbers each week, and if it's under 15 minutes, you don't need to change anything yet.

Does connecting Appfigures-style store data to a portfolio tool require handing over app store credentials?

For SoleOS specifically, App Store Connect uses a scoped P8 key and Google Play uses a service account — neither requires your primary login credentials, and both can be revoked independently at any time. See the security overview and what SoleOS connects to for the exact scopes each connector requests.