State of Sonar
May 2026
Sonar — an App Store Optimization tool for indie hackers and AI agents — went live in mid-March 2026. 60 days in, here’s the recap, plus the real numbers behind iOS and Google Play keyword research, rank tracking, and the rise of AI-agent ASO workflows.
60 days since launch
Sonar went live on the week of March 16, 2026 as a free 7-day trial — one tier, every feature, unlimited apps and keywords, REST API + MCP server included. Here’s what the first 60 days look like in the database.
Developers signed up in the first 60 days, from 30+ countries.
Launch-deal seats claimed at 50% off, locked-in for life.
Programmatic requests — over half from AI agents and build pipelines.
Daily App Store + Google Play ranks collected on tracked keywords.
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.
Unique App Store & Google Play keywords with difficulty, popularity, and SERP data.
Distinct keywords tracked daily — 99,790 rank measurements collected and counting.
Apps under daily rank tracking across iOS App Store and Google Play.
Country storefronts with active keyword research — US, EU, and APAC all represented.
Share of indexed keywords that have an Apple Search Popularity score attached.
App releases auto-detected on tracked apps in the last 60 days.
iOS dominates ASO 3:1
For every Google Play app under active ASO tracking, indie developers are tracking three iOS App Store apps. The imbalance is smaller for keywords (58/42) than for apps (75/25) — Android users track relatively more keywords per app, while iOS users track more competitor apps per keyword.
- · 516 of 692 tracked apps
- · 58% of all tracked keywords
- · Apple Search Popularity scores on 98% of keywords
- · 176 of 692 tracked apps
- · 42% of all tracked keywords
77% of tracked apps are competitors
ASO is a spectator sport. 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 18 keywords.
The top one tracks 1,320.
ASO usage follows a brutal power law. Most indie developers track a focused set of 10–20 keywords for their core product. The top 10% track 230+. The single heaviest user on Sonar tracks 1,320 keywords across their app portfolio — an entire ASO research department running inside one indie hacker’s account.
Most-tracked keywords across the platform
| KEYWORD | STORE | COUNTRY |
|---|---|---|
| tracker | App Store | US |
| games | App Store | US |
| meditation | App Store | US |
| sleep sounds | Google Play | US |
| calculator | App Store | US |
| expense tracker | App Store | US |
| invoice maker | Google Play | US |
| breathing app | App Store | US |
| bill splitter | App Store | US |
| ai vacation planner | App Store | GB |
Short, generic terms like “games”, “tracker”, “sleep”, and “meditation” dominate — even though their keyword difficulty is brutal, developers are watching these search results to see who’s at the top of the market.
US leads, but Europe is a quarter of the story
The US accounts for 55% of keyword tracking, but Germany alone pulls 16%. Add France, the UK, and Czechia, and Europe makes up roughly 27% of all tracking on Sonar. Multi-locale ASO isn’t a niche use case — it’s the default for any serious indie portfolio.
3 out of 4 new keywords come from autocomplete
Of the 5,500+ keywords discovered through Sonar’s keyword research workflows, 76% come from App Store and Google Play autocomplete, 16% are pulled from what competitors rank for, and 8% are generated by AI. The free, public autocomplete data still produces the widest net for new keyword ideas.
ASO has an AI-agent problem — and it’s a feature
Over half of the top API keys on Sonar are named after coding agents, MCP clients, or in-house build pipelines — not human users. Sonar has processed 31,824 API calls from agents and pipelines running keyword research, ASO audits, and competitive analysis on autopilot. A growing share of indie hackers aren’t logging into an ASO dashboard at all — they’re calling one from Claude Code, Codex, or their own build pipeline.
Lifetime API calls from agent workflows
Of API keys made at least one call in the last 30 days
When new sign-ups tell us how they discovered Sonar, AI assistants beat Google for the top spot.
Methodology
All figures are aggregated from anonymized Sonar platform data as of May 15, 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 May 2026 edition. We’ll publish a new one every quarter — bookmark this URL to compare quarter-over-quarter ASO trends as Sonar grows.
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- Unlimited apps & keywords
- Daily rank tracking on iOS + Android
- 30+ country storefronts
- Keyword difficulty + Apple Search Popularity
- Competitor keyword gap analysis
- REST API + MCP server for AI agents
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