App Store Monitor — Track iOS Releases, Price Changes, Top Charts & ASO Keywords

ASO platforms charge hundreds of dollars a month for change feeds. This Actor watches the Apple App Store between runs and reports exactly what moved — as structured change events with field-level before/after diffs, for cents.

Built on Apple's official iTunes Lookup/Search APIs and official RSS chart feeds. No scraping fragility, no login, runs in seconds.

What it does

• Watch specific apps — pass app IDs. Tracks version releases (an app_changed with version: 3.1 → 3.2 is your competitor-shipped alert), price changes, rating movement, rating-count milestones, release dates.
• Watch ASO keywords — each keyword is a monitored result set: new apps entering results for your keyword, apps leaving, their field changes. Know when a new competitor starts ranking for your term.
• Watch top charts — top-free / top-paid per country. Chart entries, exits, and position band moves (top-3, top-10, top-25, top-50) — banded so you get "broke into top 10", not noise about #14 → #15.
• Any storefront — set a country code and monitor that regional store.

Who uses this

• App developers & ASO specialists — competitor releases, pricing moves, keyword landscape shifts, chart breakthroughs.
• Mobile agencies — per-client keyword and competitor feeds straight into Slack or Sheets.
• Investors & analysts — chart churn and category dynamics per country.

Output example

{
  "type": "app_changed",
  "source": "watch",
  "appId": 310633997,
  "name": "WhatsApp Messenger",
  "url": "https://apps.apple.com/us/app/whatsapp-messenger/id310633997",
  "changes": [
    { "field": "version", "before": "26.30.76", "after": "26.30.77" },
    { "field": "releaseDate", "before": "2026-07-28", "after": "2026-08-03" }
  ],
  "detectedAt": "2026-08-04T10:00:00.000Z"
}

Input

Field	Description
appIds	Apple app IDs tracked with field-level diffs
searchTerms	ASO keywords watched as result sets
charts	top-free / top-paid charts with position bands
country	Storefront country code
maxResultsPerList	Result set size per chart/keyword
monitorId	State namespace shared between runs

Reliability

Official Apple JSON APIs only — the most stable data source an App Store tool can have. Strict schema validation on every item; the run fails loudly rather than storing garbage. Rating counts are banded and chart positions bucketed so you only see meaningful movement. First run stores a baseline; change events start from run two.

Scheduling

Run daily via an Apify Schedule and pipe events to Slack, email, webhooks, or Google Sheets through Apify integrations. Quiet days produce no change events and cost almost nothing.