App Store niche analysis, in practice
Before building an app it is worth knowing whether the App Store has room for it. Not "how many people search this", which Apple does not publish, but the question you can actually answer from the store: who is on the first page for the phrases people type, and how strong are they. A single phrase is not enough for that; the niche is the phrase plus the queries Apple puts beside it, because those are the searches a user actually makes before installing.
aso.best builds that set from one phrase: Apple Search Ads' related queries that carry popularity, and a few of the store's own autocomplete phrases, up to twelve. All of them are searched live in the storefront you choose, in one pooled read, and the top ten of each is recorded. From those first pages come the numbers: how many distinct apps hold them, what share the strongest one holds, the median difficulty, the summed popularity of the set, and how many apps under a thousand ratings already sit in a top ten.
The verdict is a rule over those numbers. Open means small first pages and no owner: a clean listing with these phrases can reach page one. Contested means reachable with ratings, and the phrase table tells you where the leader is absent. Locked means the first pages belong to apps with hundreds of thousands of ratings; the way in is the long tail beside them, which the same table shows. Every app in the list links to its public page and visibility score, and every phrase can be tracked from there.
Written by Primo, who builds aso.best. We ship iOS apps ourselves; every method on this page is one we use on our own listings, and the hidden-field inference is tested against our own keyword field. Not affiliated with Apple.