ASO Copilot

A self-hosted, free alternative to tools like rankd.dev/AppTweak/ASOMobile for developers managing their own apps. Single-user, no accounts, no billing — just your apps.

Also exposes an MCP server so an agent (Claude Code, Claude Desktop, etc.) can manage your ASO directly: add apps, track keywords, pull health reports, spy on competitors, find keyword opportunities, and write AI copy suggestions itself with no separate API key.

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Features

• Daily keyword rank tracking — real ranks from live App Store / Google Play search results
• Unlimited apps, keywords, competitors — it's your database, no plan limits
• Competitor spy — track competitor apps and see their rank for every keyword you track
• Health score analysis — title/subtitle/screenshots/description/ratings/freshness breakdown with suggestions, same shape as the paid tools
• Keyword research — "find winning keywords" derives candidates from your + competitors' metadata and scores them by estimated demand/difficulty using live store search data
• Global Reach — scans your rank for a keyword across ~40 major App Store / Google Play storefronts, plotted on a world map
• Review analysis — rating distribution, positive/negative theme extraction, and a keyword-gap finder that mines your own reviews for untracked search terms
• Product health overlay — pairs your app's real daily active users (via a per-app PostHog project) against its ASO health score over the same window
• AI Copy Suggestions — rewrites title/subtitle/description for 8 locales (US/UK/Canada English, Spanish, German, French, Portuguese, Japanese), adapting keywords into real local search terms rather than translating literally. Two ways to generate it, no lock-in to either:
  • via OpenRouter (any backing model) through the web UI, or
  • key-free, by pointing any MCP-connected model (e.g. Claude Code) at the prepare_copy_localization_brief / save_copy_suggestions tools — the model composes the copy itself, no API spend beyond what you're already paying for the agent
• MCP server at /api/mcp for agent-driven ASO management

Stack

Next.js (App Router) + Prisma + PostgreSQL. Store data comes from the public iTunes Search/Lookup API (App Store) and google-play-scraper (Google Play). There is no free official API for search volume or keyword rank position, so:

• Rank position is real: it's your app's actual index in a live search for that term.
• Volume/difficulty are heuristics (0-100) derived from result-count and competitor-authority proxies, not real search volume — there's no free source for that.
• iOS subtitle is scraped from the public App Store product page (not exposed by the iTunes API). If Apple changes their page markup this can silently start returning null — see fetchSubtitle in src/lib/stores/appstore.ts.
• Every store call (both platforms) retries transient failures (429s, 5xx, network errors) with backoff via src/lib/withRetry.ts, so one rate-limited request doesn't fail an entire daily tracking pass.

Setup

npm install
docker compose up -d          # local Postgres on port 5433
npx prisma migrate dev        # create tables
npm run dev

Open http://localhost:3000, click Add App, search for your app, and add it.

Copy .env.example to .env and adjust DATABASE_URL if you're pointing at a different Postgres instance (e.g. Supabase/Neon/RDS instead of the bundled docker-compose one).

Daily tracking

Rank checks don't run automatically — trigger POST /api/track (protected by CRON_SECRET from your .env) once a day:

curl -X POST http://localhost:3000/api/track -H "Authorization: Bearer $CRON_SECRET"

scripts/daily-track.sh wraps this for cron:

0 6 * * * APP_URL=http://localhost:3000 CRON_SECRET=... /path/to/scripts/daily-track.sh >> /var/log/aso-track.log 2>&1

Any external scheduler works the same way (GitHub Actions schedule: trigger, a hosting provider's cron jobs, etc.) — it just needs to hit that one endpoint once a day.

Or run the bundled cron container

docker compose up -d cron starts a small Alpine container (docker/cron/) that runs scripts/daily-track.sh on a schedule via crond, hitting the app over host.docker.internal since the app itself runs on the host, not in Docker. Configure it via .env:

CRON_SECRET="..."                        # required, shared with the app's own .env
APP_URL="http://host.docker.internal:3000"  # optional, this is the default
CRON_SCHEDULE="0 6 * * *"                # optional, standard 5-field cron syntax

Connecting an agent (MCP)

The app exposes an MCP server at /api/mcp (Streamable HTTP transport) with tools for listing apps, searching stores, adding apps/keywords/competitors, pulling health reports, finding winning keywords, generating AI copy suggestions, and running a tracking pass on demand.

Point any MCP-compatible client at it, e.g. in Claude Code (.mcp.json, already checked in at the repo root pointing at localhost):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "aso-copilot": {
      "url": "http://localhost:3000/api/mcp"
    }
  }
}

There's no auth on this endpoint by default — it has full read/write access to your ASO data. Set MCP_AUTH_TOKEN in .env before exposing it beyond localhost, then have your client send it:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "aso-copilot": {
      "url": "http://localhost:3000/api/mcp",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer <MCP_AUTH_TOKEN>" }
    }
  }
}

AI Copy Suggestions

Two independent ways to generate rewritten title/subtitle/description copy, in src/components/AICopySuggestions.tsx on each app's Overview tab - pick either, both write to the same AiCopySuggestion table so the panel shows whichever ran most recently:

• OpenRouter (works from the web UI): set OPENROUTER_API_KEY in .env (get one at openrouter.ai/keys); optionally OPENROUTER_MODEL to pick a different model than the default. Click Get AI suggestions.
• MCP, no key needed: have an MCP-connected model call prepare_copy_localization_brief (returns current copy, character limits, and a localization instruction per locale - no network call, no key) and write the copy itself, then save_copy_suggestions to persist it. Useful if you're already paying for an agent and don't want a second LLM bill for this.

Analytics (optional)

Two separate PostHog integrations - don't mix them up:

• This tool's own usage analytics (are you clicking around this app, not any tracked app's users) — off by default. Set NEXT_PUBLIC_POSTHOG_KEY (and optionally NEXT_PUBLIC_POSTHOG_HOST if self-hosting PostHog) in .env to enable pageview tracking via src/components/PostHogProvider.tsx — no code changes needed, it's a no-op until the key is set.
• Per-app product health — each tracked app can link its own PostHog project (Settings tab, src/components/PostHogSettings.tsx) so its real daily active users show up next to its ASO health score on the Overview tab. Unrelated to the key above; configured per-app in the UI, not via env vars.

Project layout

• src/lib/stores/ — App Store (iTunes) and Google Play data fetching
• src/lib/health.ts — health score engine
• src/lib/research.ts — keyword candidate generation + volume/difficulty scoring
• src/lib/ai.ts / src/lib/aiLocales.ts — AI Copy Suggestions: OpenRouter prompt + call, the key-free localization-brief builder, and the 8-locale list
• src/lib/reviewAnalysis.ts — rating distribution + positive/negative theme extraction
• src/lib/posthogIntegration.ts — per-app PostHog client (daily active users query)
• src/lib/storeLinks.ts / src/lib/metricColor.ts — small shared UI helpers (outbound store links, volume/difficulty coloring) kept out of research.ts so Client Components importing them don't drag in server-only store-scraping dependencies
• src/lib/appService.ts — shared logic used by both the REST API and the MCP tools
• src/app/api/ — REST routes
• src/app/api/[transport]/route.ts — MCP server
• docker/cron/ — optional bundled cron container for daily tracking (see "Daily tracking" above)