What's New

The CLI and MCP server now have full API parity — everything you can do over REST works from your terminal or from an AI agent:

• MCP server 0.5.0 (22 tools) — agents can now read your workspace, not just public store data: tracked apps, keyword rank history, detected app changes, SERP history, and competitor gap analyses. Plus two new write tools: keyword notes and competitor keyword scans. An agent can set up tracking and check back on results, end to end.
• CLI 0.4.0 — new read commands (sonar apps lookup / search / score / extract-keywords / reviews / changes) and write commands (sonar products create / add-app / add-competitor, sonar keywords track / note, sonar competitors scan).

Write commands and tools need an API key with the write scope — create one under Settings → Developers. Update with npm i -g @sonarapp/cli@latest; MCP setups using npx -y @sonarapp/mcp pick up the new tools on the next session.

Ranking wins deserve more than a green arrow. The dashboard now has an Achievements grid showing 7 feats for each product — from your first keyword on the board to Page One, Podium, Number One, a 20-spot Climber jump, and holding 5 or 10 keywords in the Top 10 at once.

Locked achievements stay greyed out with a hint on how to earn them, so you always know what's next. Earned ones light up — and every one is shareable: click it to generate a polished card image for X with the keyword that did it, the rank, and the keyword's popularity and difficulty so people can see it wasn't a layup.

Building in public but don't want to tip off competitors? Hide the app name, the keyword, or both before sharing — popularity and difficulty stay on the card, so the brag still has receipts.

Achievements are checked daily against your full rank history, and once earned they're yours forever.

The Activity page no longer splits changes into one column per app. It's now a single chronological timeline grouped by day — newest first — so you can scan everything that happened across your apps and competitors in one pass: releases (with version bumps and release notes), metadata edits, screenshot changes, price and category moves.

Release notes also render cleaner: blank-line padding is collapsed so the 3-line preview shows actual content, with "Show more" for the full notes.

The product dashboard got a full redesign around one question: is your ASO working, and what should you do next?

• Rank Trend chart — a 30-day view of your average position across all tracked keywords, front and center. You can finally see movement at a glance instead of decoding counters.
• Smarter stat cards — Avg Rank now shows how much it moved vs last week, plus new Best Rank (and which keyword holds it) and Top 10 cards.
• Keyword watchlist — your top keywords with a mini trend sparkline, current rank, and 7-day change. Even in a quiet week, the dashboard always shows something real.
• Opportunities panel — keywords sitting just off page one, within reach of the top 3, or low-difficulty terms you're not ranking for yet — with new discoveries surfaced alongside.
• Store health at a glance — your app's rating, ratings count, and live version now appear right in the header.
• Top Improvements / Biggest Drops only appear when something actually moved — no more empty boxes.
• Achievements moved to a compact strip (still clickable to share), and dashboard pages now use your full screen width.

A big reliability and performance pass across the whole product:

Alerts that catch the worst case. Rank alerts now fire when your app drops out of the search results entirely — previously the biggest possible drop was the one that stayed silent. Alert delivery is also fixed for teams tracking the same keywords as another organization: every org now reliably gets its own notifications.

Keyword tools in every language. Keyword extraction and discovery now fully support non-Latin storefronts — Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Cyrillic, and Arabic keywords are extracted and suggested just like English ones.

Faster everywhere. The Apps overview, keyword sidebar, and keyword detail pages load with far fewer database round trips, and Android keyword refreshes are gentler and more reliable. Intermittent display errors on cached dashboard views are gone.

API improvements. GET /v1/apps and GET /v1/apps/:id/rankings now support cursor pagination (see the API docs), invalid requests no longer count against your quota or credits, and credit charges are refunded automatically when a request fails.

Unsubscribe safely. Email unsubscribe links now show a confirmation page, so overzealous corporate link scanners can't unsubscribe you by accident.

We refresh the details for every tracked Android app — rating, latest version, install count, developer info — on a schedule. Until now that ran once a day, and on busy days it couldn't get through every app in its time window, so some apps would drift a day or more out of date before the next run caught them.

The metadata refresh now runs every 4 hours. It only touches apps that have actually gone stale, so most runs are quick — and anything a run misses gets picked up by the next one a few hours later instead of waiting until tomorrow. In practice your Android app numbers now stay current within hours, matching how fresh the iOS side already was.

Daily chart-position snapshots (Top Free / Paid / Grossing) are unchanged — those remain a once-a-day reading.

You can now have Sonar watch your apps and tell you when something changes — instead of checking the dashboard to find out.

Head to Alerts and switch on exactly what you care about:

• Rank drops & gains — when a tracked app moves up or down for a keyword (you set how big a move is worth knowing about)
• Top 10 changes — when an app breaks into, or falls out of, the top 10
• New rankings — when an app starts ranking for a keyword it didn't before
• Competitor changes — when a competitor ships a new release, or changes their metadata, screenshots, price, or category
• Rating drops & review spikes — when an app's rating slips or reviews suddenly pick up

Everything is off until you turn it on, and matching changes arrive as a single daily email digest — no inbox spam. You can send the digest to a different address (a shared or team inbox) if you don't want it going to your login email. Every alert also shows up in an in-app feed on the Alerts page, so you have the full history even if you mute the emails.

Ever shipped an update and wondered whether it actually helped your rankings? Now you can mark the changes you made and see them right on your charts.

Add an annotation to any of your apps with a date and a short note — for example:

• "Shipped v2.0 — new subtitle"
• "Refreshed screenshots"
• "Changed primary category"

Each annotation shows up as a numbered marker on your rank charts, so you can line up what you did against what happened to your ranks:

• On the new Rank Trend chart at the top of the Rankings page (your average position across all tracked keywords over time)
• On the keyword detail page's rank and popularity/difficulty charts
• On the keyword quick-look panel

Add, edit, and delete annotations inline — they're tied to the app, so a single note appears across every keyword chart for that app.

You can also pin individual keywords onto the Rank Trend chart — click the line-chart icon next to any keyword in the rankings table to overlay its rank history (up to 6 at once) alongside your average, so you can watch a specific keyword's development up close.

We track your rank by reading the App Store search results each day — but the store only returns the top ~180–200 apps for a query. If your app sits below that, there's simply no position to record that day.

Until now, the tables would keep showing your last-known rank as if it were current (with a "—0" no-change indicator), and a keyword you'd never ranked for looked the same as a blank. That made a real drop-off impossible to tell from a plateau.

Now every rank surface shows one of three honest states:

• #N — you're live in the results
• >200 (was #N) — you had this rank but have since dropped out of the trackable window (hover for the date you were last seen). On the Rankings table the 1d/7d/30d change columns are blanked instead of showing a fake "no change", and these sort below your live ranks.
• Not ranked — your app has never appeared in the top ~200 for this keyword

This applies across the Rankings table, the Keywords table (single app and cross-store), and the opportunity matrix. The "Ranking / Not ranking" filter now treats a dropped-out keyword as not currently ranking.

Nothing changed about how often we check — your live-ranking keywords update exactly as before. This just stops stale numbers from masquerading as current ones.

When you added keywords — to a new app, an existing one, or imported from a competitor — their difficulty and popularity used to stay blank until the overnight refresh ran. That made it hard to judge a keyword right when you cared about it.

Now those two scores are computed the moment you add the keyword — about a second, for both the App Store and Google Play. A freshly added keyword briefly shows "Calculating…" and the table fills itself in, no refresh needed.

Exact rank (your app's position for that keyword) still updates on the daily cycle, so it appears a bit later — but difficulty and popularity, the numbers you use to pick keywords, are now instant.

Apple changed the App Store search endpoint we relied on for iOS keyword rankings, which stopped iOS ranks, difficulty, and popularity from refreshing. We've moved iOS rank tracking onto Apple's documented Search API and everything is updating again.

We checked the new source against known-accurate App Store rankings across a wide spread of keywords — broad, branded, and long-tail — and it matched the real ranking order position-for-position through the top results. So your iOS ranks are just as trustworthy as before.

A bonus from the switch: when you add an iOS keyword, its rank now fills in within about a second, right alongside difficulty and popularity — no more waiting for the overnight cycle to see where your app sits.

Google Play rankings were never affected.

Two refinements to keyword and review data:

• iOS keyword popularity now populates alongside difficulty. Previously many iOS keywords showed a difficulty score but no popularity — that gap is closed, so you get the full picture for every tracked iOS keyword.
• Reviews load instantly when you add a new app or competitor, instead of waiting for the next scheduled refresh. After that, reviews keep refreshing automatically.

Sonar now reads the last ~90 days of an app's reviews and summarizes them with AI: what people praise, what they complain about (with real quotes), and notable feature requests. Re-run it after 90 days and it compares against the previous summary to show what's improving, persisting, or resolved.

It works for your own apps and any tracked competitor — so you can see what a rival's users love or hate and turn it into an opportunity. Open it from the redesigned Reviews page (pick an app from the title dropdown, then Analyze reviews), or straight from the Competitors table and any app's detail panel.

The Reviews page also got a cleaner layout and pagination, so long competitor review lists stay fast.

The Reviews browser previously only kept reviews from the last 90 days, so apps with steady-but-infrequent reviews (or competitors in smaller markets) often looked nearly empty. It now stores and shows the full recent review history Apple and Google expose (up to ~500 per app), so you get a real picture of what users say over time.

AI review insights still summarize the last 90 days so trends stay current.

iOS reviews sometimes came back empty — both in the Reviews browser and when generating AI insights. Sonar now keeps each tracked app's recent reviews continuously synced, so they load instantly and reliably every time you open the Reviews page, no matter the store or country.

This also makes the Reviews page faster: reviews are read from your synced data instead of being fetched on the spot.

Getting started is smoother:

• A guided day-0 welcome helps brand-new orgs pick a path instead of staring at an empty dashboard.
• The add-product wizard walks you through tracking your first app, with faster tracking and ranked-only keyword discovery.
• A dedicated New Research Project page makes one-off keyword research a first-class flow.
• Newly added products are auto-selected in the sidebar so you land where you expect.

Writing your App Store and Google Play metadata is now a guided flow. Listing Helper lets you draft your title, subtitle, and keyword field with:

• Live character counts against each store's limits
• Keyword coverage scoring as you type
• Suggestions pulled from your tracked keywords and competitor listings

Find it in the sidebar under Listing Helper.

Every data table now has persistent column controls. Toggle the columns you care about — popularity, difficulty, rank, results count, notes — and your selection is remembered across sessions.

Combined with the new keyword text/regex filter and the Export button now lifted into the top bar, the tables are far easier to slice for your own workflow.

A few upgrades landed together:

• Compare apps dialog — line up your app against competitors side by side.
• Version change detection — Sonar now records app version changes automatically on each metadata sync, feeding the Activity feed.
• All reviews, not just low-star — the Reviews page shows the full picture, with country names in the selector (sorted alphabetically).

The REST API now supports product-centric write endpoints. Create products, track apps, add keywords, and trigger competitor scans without touching the dashboard.

API keys now carry scopes:

• read (default) — every GET endpoint
• read+write — POST/PATCH on products, tracked apps, keywords, and competitor scans (Full plan only at issuance)

Generate scoped keys from Settings → API keys.

API-only users can now buy prepaid credit packs ($10–$100) instead of a monthly subscription. Credits are spent per call on the stateless scraper endpoints, and you start with 50 free credits on signup.

• No subscription required for pure API/MCP use
• Failed requests are never charged
• Full-plan users get a daily quota with credit overflow

Existing Agent-plan subscribers keep their unlimited monthly access.

Sonar is now AI-native end to end:

• @sonarapp/cli — npm i -g @sonarapp/cli, then sonar for app lookup, keyword research, rankings, competitors, revenue, and CSV/JSON export.
• @sonarapp/mcp — a Model Context Protocol server exposing 9 stateless tools so Claude, Cursor, and other agents can query Sonar directly.

Both authenticate with your SONAR_API_KEY.

A new free public tool: App Store Roast. Drop in any App Store or Google Play listing and get an AI-graded teardown — an overall grade (F → A+), a one-line verdict, and graded sections for Icon, Screenshots, Title & Subtitle, Description, and Reviews, each with an actionable ASO tip.

It's free, shareable, and a fast way to see where a listing is leaving installs on the table.

New signups can now explore a read-only demo workspace — real apps, keywords, rankings, and reviews — before being asked for a credit card. It's the fastest way to see what Sonar does with live data, no setup required.

Start your trial whenever you're ready and you'll switch to your own workspace.

Research projects let you organize keyword research independently of tracked apps — perfect for pre-launch exploration or comparing markets.

• Multi-locale: research the same keywords across countries and languages
• Per-project filters and a one-click refresh for stale keywords
• Editable icon and name, with a Lucide icon picker
• Per-row actions to rename or delete projects and products

The Rankings and Keywords pages got sharper:

• Rank trend sparklines inline in the rankings table
• Filter rankings to ranked-only keywords, plus store/country and branded/generic toggles
• Store/country multi-select on the keyword table
• Clickable rows and keyword notes that sync across views

Sonar now estimates app revenue using install counts and category benchmarks — available in the dashboard, via the /api/v1/apps/revenue endpoint, and as sonar revenue in the CLI.

Bulk revenue and review filters make it practical for automation and portfolio-wide analysis.

The new Keyword Opportunity Matrix plots your keywords on a popularity-vs-difficulty scatter chart, so the high-volume / low-competition opportunities jump out instantly. Quadrants make it obvious which terms to prioritize and which to skip.

The Activity feed gives you a timeline of detected changes across your apps and competitors — new releases, metadata edits, screenshot swaps, price and category changes. Keep tabs on what competitors are shipping without checking the stores by hand.

A big foundational release:

• Free public tools — ASO Score Checker and Keyword Generator, no signup needed
• Multi-country support across keyword research and rank tracking
• REST API access on all paid plans, with the Agent plan for API-only use
• Single-tier pricing with everything included

Review monitoring went live: fetch reviews on demand from both the App Store and Google Play, paginated across all pages, with a rich app detail sheet for quick inspection. This is the foundation the later AI Review Insights build on.