How to read App Store Connect analytics is the question every solo founder asks in week two — the Connect dashboard is dense, the default view is wrong, and the four metrics that change Monday decisions sit three clicks below the page you land on. Most week-two founders read the catalog-wide average and ship decisions against a number that absorbs every keyword into one line; the read this post lays out surfaces the four metrics the Monday brief actually uses.
The default view hides what matters. App Store Connect lands on the Impressions and Product Page Views screen — a single screen that publishes the number of unique users who saw the listing, the number of product page views, and the conversion rate between the two. The conversion rate on this screen is the catalog-wide average, not the keyword-level read that matters; it absorbs every keyword the listing ranks for into one number, and a single rank movement on a long-tail tail flattens the line. Skip the default view in week one; the four metrics that change Monday decisions sit on the four screens below it, in this order: Sales and Trends, Retention, Sources, and Crashes.
Sales and Trends is the first screen below the default. Sales and Trends publishes download units and proceeds at the daily level, broken down by App Store territory and by download source. The reading the founder makes in week one is the seven-day rolling average of downloads, side by side with the prior week — a single busy day cannot masquerade as a trend. The same rolling-average read is the input the Monday brief returns, and the input that absorbs paid-versus-organic asymmetry before the keyword-level source split lands. The matching input shape sits at the Monday KPI brief — the brief covers the same Monday cadence and the same week-on-week comparison the rolling average returns.
Retention is the second screen. Retention publishes the day-1, day-7, and day-30 retention curves at the platform level, with the cohort broken down by acquisition source. The reading the founder makes in week one is the day-1 retention by acquisition source — the cohort of users who arrived from paid versus organic, and the share that returned the following day. Paid install that lands at a day-1 retention under 30 percent is paid install you are renting; organic install that lands at a day-1 retention over 40 percent is organic install you can defend on its own. Day-7 retention is the input that decides whether the noun-name fix the matching review-themes dashboard returns is a real ship.
Sources is the third screen. Sources publishes the install-source breakdown for every keyword the listing ranks for, the search term that delivered the user, and the matching page the user landed on. The reading the founder makes in week one is the search-term split for the four highest-volume keywords — the search term the user typed, the page the user landed on, and the conversion between the two. App Store Connect calls the page a Product Page, and the matching variant rotation sits at /dashboard/ab-tests. Match the search term the user typed to the page they landed on, and the rank-tracker movement line of the Monday brief has the matching read by the time the next Monday arrives.
Crashes is the fourth screen. Crashes publishes the crash-affected user rate at the platform level, broken down by app version and by device. The reading the founder makes in week one is the day-over-day change in the crash-affected user rate, not the absolute number — a single one-point movement against last week is what triggers a hot-fix before the rating regression line of the brief absorbs the next Monday’s read. The four screens below the default — Sales and Trends, Retention, Sources, Crashes — are the entire Connect analytics read; the rest is dashboard ballast that does not change Monday decisions. Bowroom’s Solo tier covers the four-screen read alongside the matching brief and review-themes dashboard on one subscription. The entry that fits a week-two founder lives at /pricing.