Four Ways Grin Apps Uses Store Intelligence to Conquer the Mobile Marketplace

Grin Apps, a publisher of "companion apps" for major social networks, describes how it uses Sensor Tower's Store Intelligence platform to guide product and launch decisions. Written in June 2015 by Grin co-founder Brandon Brown as a guest post, the piece is partly a case study and partly a promotion of Sensor Tower's enterprise-level offering, which is separate from its App Intelligence (ASO) product. The perspective is that of a small indie publisher in a young app vertical, relying on competitive data as a differentiator.

Four use cases are outlined. First, social network evaluation: with download and revenue data across all apps and countries, Grin benchmarks breakout apps such as Dubsmash and Periscope against incumbents like Snapchat and Instagram. It scores each app's last 30 days of download velocity against its counterparts to decide whether a companion app is worth building. Second, competitive app analysis: Grin aggregates lifetime downloads across all apps with similar functionality, applies industry-standard retention metrics to estimate active users, and compares that figure with the total market opportunity. Its example contrasts roughly 150,000 total downloads with a potential audience of over one million users, which would indicate an unsaturated concept.

Third, publisher portfolio analysis uses the Publisher View to track the full catalogs of dozens of competitors, including new concepts they launch, each concept's revenue share, and the track record of new entrants to a vertical. Fourth, category trending supports launch strategy. Because Grin depends on organic growth rather than paid user acquisition, it monitors category rankings in real time to choose where an app has the best chance of ranking and being discovered.

The article offers no quantitative results or outcomes beyond the illustrative saturation example. It presents Grin's workflow as a practical model for mass-market, user-centric publishing and closes with a call to request a demo.