State of Sonar
June 2026
Sonar — an App Store Optimization tool for indie hackers and AI agents — just finished its first quarter. Here’s what 90 days of data say about iOS and Google Play keyword research, the indie habit-app gold rush, and AI agents quietly taking over ASO workflows.
One quarter in — and accelerating
Sonar went live the week of March 16, 2026. Three months later, every top-line number is up sharply on the May edition — sign-ups, programmatic usage, and the sheer volume of ranks Sonar collects every day.
Developers signed up since launch — up 53% from 159 in the May edition.
Launch-deal seats claimed at 50% off, locked-in for life.
Lifetime programmatic requests — +64% in a month, most from agents and build pipelines.
Daily App Store + Google Play ranks collected — 5.5× the May total, ~24k added every day.
ASO by the numbers
Aggregated from Sonar’s live ASO platform: keyword research, daily rank tracking, and competitor analysis across the App Store and Google Play. The keyword index has doubled since May.
Unique App Store & Google Play keywords with difficulty, popularity, and SERP data — 2× the May count.
Distinct keywords with a fresh rank in the last 30 days — ~24,000 measurements collected every single day.
Apps under daily rank tracking across the iOS App Store and Google Play.
Country storefronts with active keyword research — US, EU, and APAC all represented.
Share of indexed keywords carrying an Apple Search Popularity score (112,790 of 114,424).
App releases auto-detected on tracked apps in the last 30 days alone — 1,079 lifetime.
iOS still dominates ASO ~3:1
For every Google Play app under active ASO tracking, indie developers watch roughly three iOS App Store apps. The split is gentler for keywords (61/39) than for apps (73/27) — Android users track relatively more keywords per app, while iOS users track more competitor apps per keyword.
- · 667 of 932 unique tracked apps
- · 61% of all tracked keywords
- · Apple Search Popularity on 100% of tracked iOS keywords
- · 265 of 932 unique tracked apps
- · 39% of all tracked keywords
- · Install counts (minInstalls) available where iOS has none
77% of tracked apps are competitors
ASO is a spectator sport — and the ratio hasn’t budged since May. For every app a developer adds as “their own” in Sonar, they add roughly three competitors to watch — pulling daily ranks, screenshots, releases, and metadata changes. Competitive intelligence is the gravity well of App Store Optimization.
Tracked as your own product
Tracked to spy on
Watched for every own app
The median developer tracks 25 keywords.
The top one tracks 3,122.
ASO usage follows a brutal power law — and it got steeper this quarter. The median developer now tracks 25 keywords (up from 18), but the heaviest user on Sonar tracks 3,122 keywords across their portfolio — more than double May’s top account. An entire ASO research department running inside one indie hacker’s login.
The indie habit-app gold rush
The most-tracked keywords this quarter tell a story. Last edition it was a scattered mix of “games”, “meditation”, and “calculator”. Now the top of the board is a tight cluster of habit, focus, and routine terms — the keywords behind the wave of indie productivity and habit-tracker apps shipping in 2026.
| KEYWORD | STORE | COUNTRY |
|---|---|---|
| tracker | App Store | US |
| focus | App Store | US |
| fitness | App Store | US |
| streak | App Store | US |
| routine | App Store | US |
| habit | App Store | US |
| goal tracker | App Store | US |
| planner | Google Play | US |
| expense tracker | App Store | US |
| checklist | App Store | US |
“tracker”, “focus”, “streak”, “routine”, and “habit” dominate — brutally competitive head terms (average tracked-keyword difficulty is 45/100), but everyone wants to see who’s winning that market.
The US share is shrinking — the world is catching up
The US still leads keyword tracking, but its share fell from 55% to 49% this quarter as more international developers joined. Germany holds second, and Europe overall makes up roughly 28% of all tracking. Multi-locale ASO isn’t a niche — it’s the default for any serious indie portfolio.
AI just overtook competitors as a keyword source
Autocomplete still produces three out of four new keywords. But the real story is underneath: AI-generated keywords climbed from 8% to 12.5%, edging past competitor-pulled keywords (down from 16% to 12%). For the first time, indie developers are letting a model brainstorm their keyword set more than they’re reverse- engineering their rivals’.
ASO has an AI-agent problem — and it’s a feature
Nearly half of the active API keys on Sonar are named after coding agents, MCP clients, or in-house build pipelines — names like aso-service, Orchestrator, claude-code, and AppFactoryPipeline. Sonar has now processed 52,176 API calls running keyword research, ASO audits, and competitive analysis on autopilot. A growing share of indie hackers never open an ASO dashboard — they call one from Claude Code, Codex, or their own pipeline.
Lifetime API calls from agent workflows
Of API keys made at least one call in the last 30 days
Among developers who tell us, AI assistants out-refer Google 2:1 as the way they discovered Sonar.
Methodology
All figures are aggregated from anonymized Sonar platform data as of June 16, 2026. “Tracked” means an app or keyword that an indie developer has explicitly added to their daily-monitoring workflow. Rank measurements are collected from the live App Store and Google Play SERPs. Keyword Apple Search Popularity is sourced from the Apple Search Ads API. No individual customer data, app identities, or rank values are disclosed.
This is the June 2026 edition. Compare it against the May 2026 edition to see how indie ASO is shifting month over month — bookmark the report hub to catch the next one.
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