DUBAI, UNIED ARAB EMIRATES – Platformance launched AppMonitor, a free tool that lets a marketer benchmark their app against others in its category across the Apple App Store and Google Play. It covers category rankings, ratings, version history, rank movement over time and the themes running through user reviews. Saudi Arabia and UAE are the opening markets and the tool is live at
The region’s app market is growing faster than the global average. App downloads across the GCC grew 2.6% year on year in the first half of 2025, against 0.5% worldwide, and in app purchase revenue across the region reached $700 million over the same period, up 20% (2025 Middle East App Growth Report, Bidease and Sensor Tower, published November 2025).
Reading that market as a marketer has meant buying an enterprise subscription. The tools that track app rank and category position are priced for large product organisations, which puts them out of reach of most marketing teams in the region. Platformance built AppMonitor to give those teams the same read at no cost.
“We saw a gap between how much of the customer journey now starts inside an app and how little the average marketing team can see of it,” said Waseem Afzal, Founder & CEO, Platformance. “The data exists. It has been sold at a price most teams in this market cannot justify. We built AppMonitor and took it off the paywall because a market where more people can read the same numbers is a better market to operate in.”
App store performance feeds directly into what a brand pays to acquire a customer. An app that sits below its category peers converts less of the traffic already paid for, which raises the cost of every acquisition that follows. Ratings work the same way, and the pattern in written reviews often shows the reason before the numbers do.
Those fixes sit with the digital and product teams who build and maintain the app rather than with marketing. AppMonitor is built to give the marketer the evidence for that conversation.
“A marketer can see their acquisition cost climbing without being able to point at why,” said Rehmath Hussain, Associate Director, App Marketing, Platformance. “Rank movement, a version release and a shift in review sentiment usually explain a good part of it. Having that on a screen changes the conversation with the app team from a complaint into a brief.”
“Measurement is hard in this region because every channel comes with its own ecosystem,” said Afzal. “The app stores are one of those ecosystems, and most marketers here have been reading them second hand. AppMonitor covers that one, and we are already working on the next.”
