bootuz/keywordista

Keywordista is a self-hosted tool for independent iOS app developers who want to track how their apps rank for specific keywords in Apple's App Store, without paying for a subscription service. It runs entirely on your Mac, stores all data locally, and gives you a real history of ranking positions over time instead of one-time screenshots that go stale. The way it works: a small menu-bar app sits in your Mac's top bar and manages a local web server. That server uses a Swift-based framework called Vapor to handle data, stores everything in a local SQLite database, and serves a web dashboard you open in your browser at a local address (127.0.0.1:8080). The dashboard is built with Svelte, a web framework, and shows keyword rankings across any of Apple's 175 App Store storefronts. Every night at 3am UTC, the server automatically checks how your apps rank for the keywords you are tracking. At 4am, a second check watches Apple's top free app charts, and if any of your apps enters, moves within, or drops off those charts, your browser fires a notification. The data collection is careful: one request per second to Apple's servers, and the server only listens on your local machine, so no one outside your Mac can reach it. To install it, you download a pre-built file, drag the app into your Applications folder, and launch it. There is also a way to run it without the menu-bar app if you prefer to manage the server yourself. If you want to modify the code, you need Swift 5.10 or later and Node 18 or later. The project has three distinct layers: the Vapor backend, the Svelte web dashboard, and the macOS menu-bar wrapper. A few things are noted as not yet finished. The app has slots reserved for Apple Search Ads popularity data but no actual fetching of it yet. Chart position history over time and automatic updates for the menu-bar app itself are also listed as future additions. Currently the tool only runs on macOS 13 or newer.