In short
To research competitors before building an app, list five to eight direct rivals and compare their ratings and review counts. Read their complaint themes, check their ads, pricing and keywords, then write one sentence about how you would be better. AppHitlist shows these on one app page, but its estimates can be wrong. Skip the idea if you have no gap.
Who counts as a direct competitor?
A direct competitor does the same job for the same person. If your idea is a sleep sound app for new parents, a meditation app for office workers is a neighbor, not a rival.
Find rivals the way a customer would. Search the App Store for the problem in plain words, then open the top results and the apps listed as similar on their pages. Use more than one phrasing, since each search brings up a slightly different set.
Count the non-app substitutes too: a spreadsheet, a notes app, a paper planner. They show what people do today and why they might switch. Aim for five to eight apps, so the work stays finite.
How do you compare ratings and review counts?
Start with two numbers for each competitor: the star rating and the number of ratings. The count is a rough sign of how many people use the app. The stars show how well it serves them.
Read the pair together. A large count with a high rating means the leader is well loved and hard to beat head on. A large count with a low rating means many people use an app they don't like, which is the best kind of opening. A small count with a high rating is an app that is still small. It may be new, or niche.
Look at the most recent reviews, not only the average. An app that was good three years ago can look very different after a bad update.
What do the complaints tell you?
Open the 1- and 2-star reviews for each rival and sort them into topics. AppHitlist groups them for you as complaint themes, but a spreadsheet works fine too.
Look for themes that appear at several competitors, not just one. If three of your five rivals get the same complaint about billing, onboarding or missing export, you have found a gap in the whole category, not one app's bad week.
Write each theme as a feature you could ship. A complaint such as 'it charges me after the trial' becomes 'clear trial reminder and easy cancel', which you can build and put on your screenshots.
What do ads, pricing and keywords add?
Complaints show what users dislike. Three more checks show how the rivals win and keep customers.
Ads: see whether each rival runs Meta ads and how long its longest ad has been live. An ad running for months is probably paying for itself, and its hook and angle show what message works in the category. AppHitlist sorts ads by days live and does not show spend.
Pricing: note the model for each app, such as free with a subscription, a one-time purchase, or a paywall after a trial. Check what the first paywall asks for. That is the price your users will compare you with.
Keywords: look at the terms where each rival ranks high in App Store search. A keyword gap is a term where a competitor ranks in the top results and you don't. In AppHitlist, Competitors tracks rivals against an app you own, so you need to add your own app first. Before launch, you can still check keyword popularity and difficulty.
How do you decide to build or skip?
After the research, force a decision. A one-sentence gap is enough: we do X for Y, and the rivals fail at Z.
Revenue estimates for rivals can be wrong, so use them to compare, not to forecast what you will earn. Base the decision on several signals that agree.
- Build when you can name a gap that appears across several rivals, you can ship a first version alone, and the category has at least a few apps with healthy ratings and activity.
- Build when the leaders are strong but neglected: old design, long gaps between updates, unanswered reviews.
- Skip when one app has a high rating, a huge review count and a free, complete product that covers your whole idea.
- Skip when you cannot say how you would be better in one sentence.
- Skip when the only way to win is to out-spend rivals on ads.
How do you keep the research in one place?
Research that lives in your head disappears after a week. Put it in a single sheet with one row per competitor.
Use these columns: app name, release date, last update, rating, number of ratings, price model, longest-running ad in days, top three complaint themes, keywords where it ranks, and one line on what it does well. Open the sheet again a month later. If you save the rivals in AppHitlist and follow them, it emails you when their rank, ads or revenue estimate change, so you don't need to check by hand.