If you ship an iOS app, App Store Connect gives you a genuinely good analytics surface. Impressions, product page views, downloads, conversion rate, retention, crashes, proceeds — broken down by territory, source type and device, with a reasonable amount of history.
It does not tell you your chart position. Not today's, not last week's, and not the day you first appeared on a chart. There is no notification, no chart report, and no historical series. For a metric that Apple itself computes, publishes publicly, and uses to decide who gets discovered, that is a strange omission — and it catches out nearly everyone the first time they go looking for it.
What App Store Connect does give you
Worth being precise, because the gap is narrower and more annoying than "Apple tells you nothing":
| You get | You don't get |
|---|---|
| Impressions and product page views | Your rank on any chart |
| Downloads and redownloads | The day you entered or left a chart |
| Conversion rate | Which category chart you're on |
| Proceeds and subscriber counts | Any chart history at all |
| Source type — Search, Browse, Referral | Which competitors passed you |
The "Browse" source type is the closest thing available, and it is a real signal: it counts people who found you without searching, which includes chart and feature placements. A sustained jump in Browse impressions usually means something discovery-related happened. But it will not tell you what, where, or at what position — and it moves for featuring, category browsing and Today-tab placement too, so it cannot be read as a chart signal on its own.
Why the omission matters
Chart position is not a vanity metric for a small app. It is a step function in discovery: an app on a category top 100 is on a shelf that people browse, and an app at rank 101 is not on that shelf at all. The traffic difference across that boundary is not proportional to the one-place difference in rank.
Which produces the actual problem. The days that matter most to a small app are the days it crosses that boundary, and those are exactly the days nothing tells you. People find out weeks later, from a download chart they happen to re-examine, by which time whatever caused it is impossible to reconstruct.
The asymmetry is worth sitting with: your chart position is public. Any competitor, investor or journalist can look it up about you today. You are the only party in that exchange who has to go and find it out.
How to check it yourself
Three options, in increasing order of effort actually paying off.
Look at the public charts directly. Apple publishes the top 100 per category and chart type, and the App Store app will show you the category charts. This is free and immediate, and it works fine as a spot check. What it cannot do is tell you anything about yesterday — there is no history, so you can only ever see today, and only if you remember to look.
Scroll the chart by hand and count. People do this. It works, it produces a number, and it takes a few minutes per category per day. It is also the kind of task that gets done diligently for a week and then not at all, which means the one day you most needed the data is the day nobody checked.
Have something record it daily. The data is public and stable, so the only real requirement is that somebody reads it every day and keeps the series. That is what this site does: we crawl the US top 100 for every category daily and keep the history, so an app's chart position is a series you can look at rather than a snapshot you had to be present for.
Search for your app to see its current position and daily history. If it is not charting right now, the page will say so plainly — that is the majority state for most apps, and it is a finding, not an error.
What to watch once you can see it
Chart position on its own is a number. It becomes useful when you can put it next to two other things:
- Your category's turnover. In a category where a third of the chart changes weekly, dropping ten places means much less than it does in a stable one. How much of the top 100 changes each day has the current figures.
- What it takes to chart where you are. The smallest charting app in your category is the concrete bar you are clearing or missing. Which categories are easiest to chart in ranks all 22 by that measure.
One thing we deliberately do not offer: download or revenue estimates. Plenty of tools will give you a confident number for any app you name. We do not, because we cannot calibrate one to a standard we would defend in public — and an uncheckable number that looks authoritative is worse than an honest gap.