How to Perform an Effective Competitive App Analysis

The mobile app market is highly competitive and dynamic, evolving rapidly. A brilliant idea or standout features alone is not enough to ensure an app’s success.

Instead, it’s an in-depth understanding of your competition and the insights that position your app uniquely in the market that are truly make or break.

Google Play Store alone has more than 2 million apps (and growing), making the competition even more intense. Plus, with global app revenue in 2023 increasing to $543.50 billion and users spending an average of 2 hours and 51 minutes on mobile apps every day, capturing and retaining user attention has never been more crucial.

Indeed, app developers and owners need detailed competitor analysis to be able to anticipate key trends and develop the most effective strategies for success. This is called competitive app analysis – which gives you a crucial look into your rival’s strategies and market positioning.

Using this insight, you’ll be able to make more informed decisions on how to improve features and user experience to give your app the best chance out there.

Here, we show you how to do a killer competitive app analysis.

What is a competitive app analysis?

Competitive app analysis deals with understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors, and includes analyzing the following:

• App features
• User reviews
• Marketing strategies
• Performance metrics

This analysis provides a complete overview of the competitive environment, enabling you to make informed decisions regarding the best development and marketing tactics for your own app.

Once you have this information, you can uncover critical market gaps that your app can fill. For instance, if users are expressing dissatisfaction with a competitor’s user interface, you can seize the opportunity to design a much more intuitive interface and win those users over.

Analyzing competitors also helps in shaping your marketing efforts, helping to keep them more in line with what appeals most to your target audience. Indeed, competitors’ feedback becomes actionable insights for you, guiding important improvements to your app’s features and services.

The importance of competitive app analysis

Why should you bother with competitive app analysis? It all boils down to a few key reasons:

Identify market trends

Keeping up with new trends is the most important thing you can do to keep your app relevant. You need to know what features are popular at the moment, what users prefer and what technologies are on the rise.

By analyzing these trends, you can spot important changes in user requirements, adjust your roadmap for development accordingly and remain competitive as the market continuously changes around you.

Improve user experience

You can analyze feedback on your rivals’ apps and address the common grievances voiced by their users. You can then use that info to your competitive advantage to provide a much better experience to those disgruntled end-users.

Knowing what puts your target audience off helps you avoid similar problems in your app, leading to better customer satisfaction, retention rates and positive recommendations.

Refine marketing strategies

Studying competitors’ marketing strategies allows you to enhance your own, making them more effective in reaching and engaging your target market. By identifying the strengths and weaknesses in competitors’ campaigns, you can create more compelling messages, optimize budgets, and outperform your competition.

Discover unique value propositions

Differentiating what makes your app unique can help it stand out in a saturated market and attract a larger user base. It’s important to truly understand what sets your app apart from the competition so you can emphasize these differentiators in both your marketing and development strategies.

How to do a competitive analysis for your mobile app

The mobile app market is competitive, with new apps launching every day. To succeed, you must understand what your rivals are doing, where their strengths and weaknesses lie and how you can surpass them.

Here’s how to effectively analyze your competition:

1. Find your top competitors

Any competitive analysis must start with identifying major competitors. Similarweb’s app intelligence feature is invaluable here, as it details the top apps in a particular category, outlining the main players and their ranking trends over time – helping you to understand exactly who your competitors are.

Here’s what you should do:

• Identify the apps with similar functionality and target audiences. This will give you a clear short list of competitors most relevant to your app
• Review the app categories that are related to your app niche to narrow down the list and focus on only your most direct competitors
• Use Similarweb’s detailed reports to get a view of your competitors’ performance, helping you to compare different apps with ease

Follow these steps to get a solid understanding of the competitive landscape, so you can begin developing the most effective strategies possible for your app.

2. Check their rankings and installs performance

Understanding how competitors perform in terms of rankings and installs is crucial for your app store optimization (ASO) strategy. Similarweb’s competitor analysis tool provides detailed data on app performance, including historical app ranking and store download volumes. Monitoring these metrics helps you gauge demand, popularity and the impact of updates on competitor rankings.

These are some of the things you could do:

• Track the daily and historical rankings of apps to keep on top of trends. Over time, changes in ranking can help you understand how effective your competitors’ strategies are
• Track the download volumes across different periods to indicate demand for and popularity of competitor apps
• Monitor how specific app updates affect their user engagement and app rankings

3. Tap into their audience

Knowing your competitors’ audiences gives you an important strategic edge. Similarweb’s App Audience and App Demographics tools offer detailed insights into user demographics and behaviors, allowing you to tailor your strategies to better reach potential users.

You can:

• Identify users of competitor apps by age, gender and location to reveal who your competitors are drawing to their apps, helping to define your own potential user base:

• Know what your target audience is interested in and what they like. These insights will inspire your content and marketing strategies:

Tailor your marketing strategies according to these insights and you’ll see a marked improvement in user acquisition and retention. After all, the more targeted the campaign, the better it resonates.

Indeed, you’ll be able to adjust your target market strategies to make your user acquisition tactics more appealing to target users.

4. Uncover engagement and retention behavior

Understanding how users engage with competitor apps is a big piece of the puzzle when it comes to user engagement and loyalty.

Similarweb’s App Engagement and User Retention tools offer deep insight into how users interact with competitor apps over time. You can:

• Track daily and monthly active user numbers to highlight user engagement levels and how often their apps are used
• Track user retention rates over time. High retention rates show strong loyalty to and satisfaction with the app
• Identify the features and updates that are boosting engagement rates so you can make the right decisions regarding the updates for your own app

Once you find out what keeps users coming back, you’ll know how to make improvements in your app’s features and user experience to outperform the competition.

Staying ahead with continuous analysis

The mobile app market is a dynamic whirlwind, which demands ongoing competitive analysis if you want to keep your app relevant.

As discussed, regular updates, adapting to user feedback and monitoring competitors’ activities are the key to staying ahead. Competitive app analysis tools like Similarweb are essential for tracking app performance and usage, analyzing user reviews, and monitoring many other key engagement metrics. Continuous analysis means not just imitating but innovating to deliver the best possible app experience to your users.

Start your competitive app analysis today to take your app to new heights.

FAQs

How do I find my app’s competitors?

Identify other apps that come with the same features, target the same audience, and share the same market niche. Market trends and app performance analysis tools can help in identifying competitive apps that return search results for a relevant keyword and pinpoint market opportunities.

Which metrics should I pay the most attention to when doing a competitive app analysis?

Focus on the number of downloads, user ratings, and revenue data. In addition to that, store rankings, user engagement metrics, retention rates, and, if possible, the trend of in-app purchases should be analyzed as well to get a clear overview of your competitor’s performance and how they are positioned in the market.

How do I choose the right sample size for competitor analysis?

Choose 5 to 10 competitor apps for a balanced view of the market. With this sample size, you can identify consistent trends, spot important outliers, capture a broad spectrum of market behaviors without getting overwhelmed with too much data, perform an in-depth comparison, and keep the data manageable.

How often should I conduct competitive app analysis?

It is advisable to run a preliminary analysis during the planning phase, with regular updates, in particular before new major app updates are launched or entry into new markets. Quarterly reviews will let you know the market trends.

by Monique Ellis

Content Marketing Manager

Monique, with 7 years in data storytelling, enjoys crafting content and exploring new places. She’s also a fan of historical fiction.