New service lets you track the competition's mobile game downloads

Tracking the mobile game downloads of your competitors and other developers can be difficult unless they decide to release those details themselves, but there's a new app that will give you a peek at their numbers. Analytics firm Distimo has launched a new service called AppIQ that provides subscribers valuable data like estimated downloads and revenue (including in-app purchases) for iOS and Android applications in 40 countries. It could be a particularly useful tool for studios scouting a specific game type, as they can not only check how other developers are performing and analyze their market share, but also see how price changes, featured listings, and version updates affected competitors' downloads in order to plan their own marketing campaigns. AppIQ provides information on revenue generation according to business models, countries, and platforms, too. When developers connect their game to AppIQ to compare their performance, the service excludes that app's transactional data in order to ensure confidentiality. The company based all of its estimates on transactional data from over 120,000 applications plugged into its Distimo Monitor tracking service. It claims to have a margin of error below 3 percent for more than half of the apps (54 percent) it tracks, and below 10 percent for almost all apps (95 percent). The group has also released Distimo Leaderboard, which allows customers to analyze the top apps in every country, category, and app store. The service supports Apple App and Mac App Store, Google Play, Amazon Appstore, Windows Phone 7 Marketplace, and others. Developers can use Distimo Leaderboard to identify which apps are currently the most popular and which are growing in popularity, as well as see how many downloads are needed in a given day to break into a platform's rankings.