Ariel welcomes everyone to a brand new live stream and introduces one of the most exciting topics they've been waiting to talk about: how to steal your competitor’s app strategy — legally.
It’s the day before Thanksgiving in the US, so Ariel hopes enough people can still join. As per tradition, before jumping into the good stuff, Ariel asks viewers what’s in their cup and where they’re from.
Ariel is in New York City, drinking hard black tea — organic Earl Grey — to wake up after a crazy week.
There’s some live chat banter as people shuffle in:
UK is in the house, and Ariel tells them they’re going to learn how to compete today.
Ariel jokes about juggling many screens and hoping not to lose the mouse again, mentioning running three computers in the past and deciding that was a bad idea: too many mice is a bad idea. Sidecar and Apple’s cross-device features are “amazing when they work,” but only work most of the time.
The stream is live on X, YouTube, and LinkedIn, but most people seem to be coming from YouTube, which is Ariel’s biggest channel. Stats on the other channels are harder to get, so YouTube is the main focus.
Streaming right before Thanksgiving feels like a weird time — everyone is traveling or working — but Ariel wanted to get this topic in because it’s something everyone should be doing.
Before diving in, Ariel brings up a Black Friday promotion.
If you’re on any of Ariel’s mailing lists, you already know: AppFigures is running a Black Friday campaign where all plans are 50% off. Ariel jokes that they “went insane” — as every year — to help people who want the tools and love a good deal.
Ariel mentions that a lot of their own purchases still happen during Black Friday.
A QR code briefly appears on screen for a special link to follow along with everything Ariel is going to demo. Even if you don’t grab it during the live stream, you can get it later.
Ariel moves into the main topic: stealing your competitor’s app strategy legally.
The goal is to:
In most niches, there are multiple competitors. You don’t need to focus on just one or two — you can look at a group and collect the things each is doing well.
Ariel emphasizes they love learning from competitors. It’s a very quick way to:
You don’t need to copy and paste everything they do — and you really shouldn’t — but you do need to understand what they’re doing unless you want to reinvent the wheel, have infinite time, and infinite money.
Even with infinite money, if your ads are incorrect or target the wrong audience, they simply won’t work. So you still need to know what you’re doing.
From talking to developers, Ariel sees the same pattern over and over:
Those guesses lead to mistakes:
Guessing = wasting time = bad.
Instead of guessing, you want to use actual data.
Ariel outlines the plan for the session:
To do all this, you need real competitive data that you can’t get just by browsing the app stores. This is what AppFigures’ new App Intelligence pulls together and makes easy.
When Ariel looks at a competitor, there are a few core questions that always come up. The process is basic, direct, and to the point.
Every time Ariel analyzes a competitor, they ask:
An app can have decent performance but still be insignificant in its market if others are much stronger.
If that’s the case, maybe you don’t want to copy that app or even spend time on it. You might want to move on to a different competitor.
Step number one: validation.
You need to know:
If you have a big team and funding, you’ll need more revenue. If you’re solo and traveling while coding, your target can be lower. But you still need a number in your head and a sense of whether a competitor is in that range.
Current performance usually means the last 30 days of data. That gives a decent view of whether the app is relevant.
But there’s a catch.
Looking only at the last 30 days could show you:
If someone says, “Last month I made X,” you don’t know if that was a random spike or part of a strong upward trend.
You need to see how the app got to its current performance:
Then you need to understand if the app is competitive in its industry. You might see an app making $100k/month, but if several other apps in the category are making much more, this one might be relatively small.
That can still be useful:
You also want to escape the silo of one or two competitors. Most niches have many, including partial competitors that don’t overlap on all features but still matter.
Once you’ve decided a competitor is worth analyzing, the next big question is: who is actually using the app?
You want to know:
Most developers, especially indies and smaller shops, don’t even think about this. Ariel comes from the pre-mobile ad world, where everyone had basic audience demographics for TV and other media. You always knew who you were targeting.
In mobile, this data is harder to come by, so most people skip it. But it exists — and it’s extremely useful.
AppFigures made this accessible for your own users in the overview, and they also surface demographics for competitors.
There are two main audience angles Ariel focuses on:
This helps you build a profile:
That’s gold for targeting — both paid and organic.
Another critical angle: are users happy?
Users might be stuck with an app they don’t love because:
If users are using an app despite a pain point, they are actively looking for alternatives. That alternative could be your app.
You discover this by reading:
Ariel will show a specific example later where ratings make it clear why this step is so important.
User acquisition is the fun part because it’s where most of your money comes back.
Ariel looks at three main areas:
If you follow Ariel’s content, you know organic keywords are a recurring theme.
They are:
A big shortcut: look at what’s already working for competitors, then evaluate whether those keywords make sense for your app.
Large apps often converge on a shared set of organic keywords. Once they’ve normalized on those, they can spend less time researching and more time improving performance to climb the ranks.
Paid keywords cost money, so the objective is to:
Looking at competitors’ paid keywords tells you:
You might think, “My app does X, I’ll just advertise on X.” That’s only half the battle.
Once a user lands on your app’s page, you still haven’t acquired them. You need to:
In a world where most apps are free to download and competition is high, users will quickly swipe away if your page doesn’t instantly resonate.
Hyper-targeting and paid keywords get a question mark from Ariel because not all apps do them — and even in 2025, not enough apps do this properly.
Hyper-targeting means:
Showing a user exactly what they want to see — not more, not less.
Different users have different needs, and that’s the whole point. You should:
If there’s only one thing you take from this session, Ariel wants it to be this: always hyper-target.
Most developers don’t think about a competitor’s activity as part of strategy analysis, but Ariel does.
This includes:
These all contribute to how quickly and effectively they can adapt.
How often do they:
If they’re making frequent changes, they’re actively using ASO to compete.
If they almost never change anything, maybe they’re:
Developers often think about native vs. non-native in a purist, technical sense:
That’s not really the case anymore for most apps.
In reality, the tradeoffs look more like this:
You need to know what your competitors are using, because it shapes:
Are they:
If you plan to “set and forget” your app while your competitors iterate constantly, you’ll be in trouble.
There’s a large ecosystem of tools to help with:
If a competitor is using advanced tooling for analytics, attribution, A/B testing, or engagement, you need to know — because those tools can also be shortcuts for you.
Permissions and SDKs tell you what’s happening under the hood.
You want to see whether they:
From this, you can infer features — even before they’re publicly launched.
For example:
Ariel wraps the presentation portion and moves to a live demo using AppFigures.
They’ll:
The chosen niche: photo editing.
Ariel has been following this category for a long time and finds it fascinating:
The specific app: Picsart (spelled “Picsart”), a photo and video editor Ariel has looked at many times.
Ariel jumps into AppFigures and pulls up Picsart.
According to AppFigures’ data for the last 30 days:
For Ariel, that’s clearly big enough to be worth analyzing.
However, Ariel also wants to see how Picsart compares within its category.
Using Keyword Inspector, Ariel looks up “photo editor” and sees a long competitive list:
A quick observation:
Keyword Inspector, focusing only on US installs, shows ~264k downloads — which matches once you realize most of Picsart’s volume is coming from India and other markets.
In the US, Picsart is:
So we’re analyzing the biggest app in the US for this niche.
Is going after the biggest app a good idea? It depends.
For the sake of the demo, Ariel sticks with Picsart.
Next, Ariel looks at Picsart’s download trends.
Lifetime / recent download data shows:
Year-over-year growth shows that:
This tells Ariel:
Despite that, when Ariel looks at revenue, the picture is different.
Revenue trends for Picsart are mostly green:
Interpretation:
In a tough market with heavy competition, this is impressive.
Ariel notes that if you look at more apps in the category and see similar red trends, it might be a sign that the entire photo-editing category is getting more difficult.
If you aren’t in this space yet, that might be a warning sign.
If you are in this space, it confirms you need to fight harder and get more sophisticated with targeting.
Next up: who is using Picsart?
Ariel asks viewers to guess the age and gender breakdown before revealing the data.
When the demographics load, Picsart’s audience looks like this (AppFigures’ combined App Store + Google Play data):
Age:
Gender:
This is why Ariel always drills into age segments instead of relying on top-line numbers.
For targeting:
Geographic breakdown shows:
If you’re entering this category and only target the US, you’ll:
Targeting India (and similar markets) needs to be a part of your strategy if you want to compete meaningfully in this category.
Ariel then looks at “app graph” data: what other apps do Picsart users have and use?
The list includes:
Key insight:
This likely means:
If you’re in this category, you must:
Now, Ariel looks at reviews and ratings.
For Picsart overall:
However, rating volume shows an interesting pattern:
If something changes around that time, it often points to:
Looking at some reviews, Ariel finds complaints like:
On the App Store specifically, the average rating is higher (around 4.67), but similar patterns appear:
Users complain about:
If you have or plan to build a competing app with a more competitive price or a better value proposition, this is a signal:
Moving to acquisition, Ariel opens Picsart’s organic keywords report.
Results:
Sorting by rank, Ariel looks at keywords where Picsart is ranked #1.
Many of these are variations of the brand name, but there are others as well.
In practice, for your own research, you would:
This is especially important in a category as competitive as photo editing.
Next, Ariel views Apple Search Ads data for Picsart.
Picsart is bidding on:
That’s a massive paid keyword portfolio.
A favorite tactic Ariel uses:
If Picsart has, say, 33%+ of all impressions on a very competitive keyword, it likely means:
For a smaller app, that’s usually not worth it.
Instead, you should:
Ariel types in some eraser-related queries:
These keywords have solid popularity and are clearly relevant to Picsart’s capabilities.
The data shows that Picsart is not dominating many of these.
Interpretation:
If your app — or your planned app — has excellent background/AI eraser features, this is a big hint about:
To highlight a specific feature like background erasing, you need to show users that exact functionality the moment they land on your page.
That’s where Custom Product Pages on the App Store come in.
Custom Product Pages are:
You can have up to 70 of them now.
You can’t browse other apps’ custom product pages directly from the App Store. There’s no public index. AppFigures does the hard work of finding and surfacing them.
Looking at Picsart, Ariel finds a custom product page centered on background removal:
This is exactly what a user searching for “background eraser” or “magic eraser” wants to see.
If someone searching for “background remover” instead saw screenshots about AI avatars, costumes, and more generic editing, they might think:
“This app isn’t for me.”
Even if the app does have the background eraser feature.
But Picsart avoids that by using custom product pages that:
By correlating:
…you can infer:
Ariel now looks at Picsart’s update timeline on the App Store.
They focus on:
For Picsart:
That’s a lot of activity for a large, mature app.
This tells Ariel:
Most big apps tend to avoid messing with the main app name once they’re established, focusing more on subtitles and descriptions instead. Picsart is more aggressive, which is notable.
Next, Ariel checks Picsart’s SDKs and tech stack.
On both Android and iOS, Picsart has used about 70 different SDKs over time, including currently installed and previously uninstalled ones.
Categories include:
Interpretation:
Given how actively their users try other apps, this level of engagement tooling makes sense.
Finally, Ariel examines Picsart’s privacy and permissions.
They collect:
Coupled with the SDKs, this confirms that Picsart:
Putting it all together, Ariel can now describe a simplified blueprint of Picsart’s strategy.
From everything seen so far, Picsart’s situation looks like this:
For someone with a photo editor or planning to build one, the message is clear:
Your checklist becomes:
After the demo, Ariel looks at questions from the live chat.
Question from Devu/Deu: How does the user demographics feature work? How do you have that data?
Ariel’s answer:
Question from Excel Growth: Which AppFigures tiers provide the information shown in the demo?
Ariel breaks it down:
The overview screen with high-level monthly numbers (downloads & revenue) is available to everyone — from the free plan all the way up to Grow Premium
Organic keywords and paid keywords are available in the Optimize and Boost plans
Features like:
…are available in Grow plans.
Grow comes in three variants:
During the session, all of these plans are on a steep Black Friday discount for a limited time.
Question from Fatpan: Can you give an example of a long-tail keyword?
Ariel suggests something like:
Long-tail keywords:
You make up for lower volume per keyword by using many such phrases.
Big apps usually don’t target all of these intensively, leaving room for smaller players.
A viewer named Deo (or De) is very skeptical and says the data can’t be accurate and that Ariel “can’t have that data.”
Ariel invites specifics:
But reiterates that the data used is based on public information plus AppFigures’ own models and infrastructure, not private device data.
Ariel ends by summarizing what you can now do:
If you’re already in a competitive niche like photo editing, you now have a detailed blueprint of how at least one top player (Picsart) operates — and where there might be gaps you can exploit.
Ariel mentions they’ll be back next week with a mystery guest to talk about:
They sign off by wishing everyone a happy Thanksgiving (for those celebrating in the US or elsewhere) and inviting additional questions in the chat, comments, or via Twitter/X and LinkedIn (links promised in the description).
If you need anything else or want Ariel to analyze another app or niche, you can reach out through those channels.
✨ This transcript was generated and enhanced by AI and may differ from the original video.
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