ASO for solo indie developers: one Mac, one $29 license

You build, ship and market an app alone, you live in Xcode more than in spreadsheets, and you want ASO to be a task you finish in an evening, not a subscription you maintain.

• Price and subscriptions. In a small sample of 18 sources, price and subscription framing was the most repeated complaint about ASO tools. Many of those sources were written by competing vendors, so treat the sample as a hint, not a measurement.
• Tools built for teams. Dashboards with many seats and reports are overhead when one person reads them.
• Numbers without actions. A chart of rankings does not tell you which word to change.
• No time for 50 storefronts. Local-language research per country is the first thing a solo developer skips.

1. Install the app and activate the license. The key works on one Mac.
2. Add your app by name, link or ID. LocalASO reads the public listing in each storefront and derives your current keywords.
3. Read the board in keyword research: rank per country, estimated volume and difficulty, and a verdict per keyword. Start with the Push keywords, where you rank 4 to 20 and the competition is not extreme.
4. Open Optimize and compare the three strategies (Max reach, Win top 3, Keep brand). Each shows reach and difficulty of the current listing next to the proposed one, with a reason for every change.
5. Paste the result into App Store Connect yourself, or connect a key to upload it as a draft. LocalASO never submits for review.

The keyword field accepts up to 100 bytes, so check what you pack with the keyword field checker. The keyword research guide explains how to weigh volume against difficulty.

• It is not an analytics suite. Downloads, revenue and conversion stay in App Store Connect. LocalASO ranks keywords, it does not measure your funnel.
• Volume and difficulty are estimates built from rating counts, not Apple search counts. Use them to compare keywords with each other.
• No Google Play, no Windows, no web access. It is a Mac app for the Apple App Store only.
• You bring your own AI. Claude Code, an Anthropic API key, Ollama, Codex or Gemini CLI. No AI credits are included.

If you also ship on Google Play, pair LocalASO with a tool that covers it.

Rank checks run in the background while you read: 15 keywords in 30 countries take about 15 to 20 minutes. See pricing or download the free app. If you work with other people, read how small studios and freelancers split the work on one license.