A glanceable dashboard for App Store revenue, on the iPhone

Updated September 22, 2026: an earlier version of this post described shareable access tokens, a strictly read-only design and no App Store analytics. AppMeta Pulse never shipped token sharing, can send replies to customer reviews, and reads App Store impressions and page views. The post is corrected below. For current plans and prices, see the AppMeta Pulse page.

Updated October 25, 2026: this post also described a free tier with one app and 30 days of history. Pulse never had one. The free download opens a demo on sample data, and everything else needs a subscription or the lifetime unlock. The widget description is corrected too.

Updated October 29, 2026: the feature and widget descriptions now match the current app, and the launch prices are replaced by the current ones.

A small post for the third Saturday in April. Tax week is just behind us in the US, the indie iOS calendar is in the lull between Q1 and WWDC, and most studios are reconciling their books.

This one’s about AppMeta Pulse, the iPhone app this studio ships for that moment. It is the smallest, simplest tool in the catalogue, and I am asked surprisingly often why it exists.

The setup problem

Two months ago I wrote about AppMeta, the native Mac client for the write side of App Store Connect, where you edit metadata, respond to reviews, and submit versions. AppMeta Pulse is the monitoring counterpart. It looks at App Store revenue and not much else.

There are two apps because of a permissions problem most indies hit eventually.

App Store Connect has one monolithic role model: either someone has access to your developer account, or they don’t. Sub-roles exist (Admin, Developer, Marketing, and so on), but they are coarse. Marketing can edit metadata and Finance can read sales reports, but nobody can have just “read-only revenue access without seeing build artefacts or being able to respond to reviews.”

So if you want your accountant to see your revenue, you have to give them an App Store Connect account, configure their role, accept that they can see things you’d rather they didn’t, and trust them to log in to a developer web tool every time they want to check.

In practice most indies send a screenshot of their numbers over Slack or iMessage. That works for a one-off request and is terrible for any regular reporting.

AppMeta Pulse was first pitched as the answer. It turned out narrower, a fast check for the account owner (see the correction below).

What does glanceable revenue look like?

AppMeta Pulse bets that the question people ask most, “how is the app selling this week?”, deserves its own glanceable tool, separate from the editorial side where you change pricing or push a new version.

The app sits on top of the App Store Connect API and reads your sales, subscription, and analytics reports. It shows:

• Daily, weekly, and monthly revenue per app and across the portfolio.
• Subscription health: active subscribers, trials, churn, and cancellations.
• Each app’s top countries.
• Comparison views against the previous period, and against last year once a year of history is stored.
• Per-app vs. portfolio splits.

Apart from replies to customer reviews, which arrived at the end of April 2026, nothing it shows can be edited. The only other thing it sends to App Store Connect is the analytics report request Apple needs before it prepares impressions data. It can’t change your prices, builds, or metadata, and it can’t submit a version.

Why the iPhone

The form factor is iPhone, and the design is meant to be read at a glance.

AppMeta does the desk work on the Mac: multi-locale metadata editing, keyword analysis, review replies. AppMeta Pulse does the check-in on the phone, over the morning coffee, in the weekly meeting with a co-founder, or at the quarterly review with the accountant.

The use case I designed for: an indie developer in a coffee shop picks up the phone, taps Pulse, sees the last seven days’ proceeds against the seven before, and decides whether to pay attention or get on with the day.

The widgets are built for that glance. The AppMeta Pulse widget shows one metric you pick, such as proceeds, MRR, or downloads, for the latest day or the last 7 or 30 days. The 7-Day Dashboard widget covers the week, and Pace, Ledger, Shape, and Where It Moved show how the week or month is going and which app moved the number. There are 12 in all, on the Home Screen and the Lock Screen.

What about sharing?

This post originally claimed a use case for AppMeta Pulse that it doesn’t cover: sharing read-only access without granting write access.

A co-founder, a designer on a profit share, or an accountant doing quarterly bookkeeping needs to see the numbers, and none of them needs to be able to change your app’s pricing.

Pulse doesn’t solve this. It has no shared access tokens and no way to give another person access to your account’s data, though you can export a CSV of a period’s sales and send it yourself. The clean way to give someone ongoing read access is still an App Store Connect account with a limited role.

The pricing structure

Pulse is free to download, and the free download runs a demo on sample data so you can see what it does. Your own numbers, the portfolio view, and the widgets need Pro: $0.99/month or $1.99/year, each starting with a 7-day free trial, or $2.99 lifetime. The prices have changed since this post was first written.

The price is low on purpose. A studio doesn’t use this tool for hours a day; it checks it briefly and relies on it. Pricing it like flagship productivity software would misjudge its place in an indie’s toolkit. A one-time lifetime price puts it in the buy-it-and-forget-it tier, which suits what it does.

What it doesn’t do

AppMeta Pulse is not a financial-planning tool. It does not project revenue, model scenarios, or replace your accountant. It does no tax calculations, and it doesn’t read Payments and Financial Reports; for when Apple’s money actually arrives, see when Apple pays developers.

Nor is it a full marketing-analytics tool. From App Store Connect’s analytics reports it uses only App Store impressions and product page views (it keeps a copy of the downloaded report).

Pulse’s main job is to show your App Store revenue at a glance, on your phone, and to keep that history after Apple’s one-year window.

A small note on the catalogue

By my count this is the third post this quarter about a tool for indie iOS developers. It’s also the last for a while. I want to get back to the consumer apps that make up most of the catalogue, and the next few weekends will probably go to them.

If you’re an indie who read this far and you keep opening App Store Connect just to see how yesterday went, AppMeta Pulse is a small iPhone app that answers it without a browser. Spring is the season of clean books.