App Radar review: the agency is a sales channel for the software. Avoid paying for both.

App Radar is a tool first. It was founded in Graz in 2015 by Thomas Kriebernegg and Christian Janesch as ASO software, it acquired the Spanish tool TheTool, and in November 2023 it was itself acquired by SplitMetrics, another software company. It is a good product. It also has an agency arm that offers managed ASO and paid campaigns, and the agency arm is what this page is about, because its economics are unlike a normal agency’s.

When a software company runs an agency, the agency is a channel. Every managed client is a subscription seat that does not churn, a case study for the product, and a lead for the upsell to a bigger tier. The service itself does not need to be highly profitable; it needs to keep the client inside the platform. That is why tool-owned agencies are often reasonably priced and why they always run the work through their own dashboard. You are not just hiring people. You are being onboarded.

This has a practical effect on the work. A tool-owned agency thinks in the tool’s categories: keyword tracking, visibility scores, ranking history, automated suggestions. Those are useful inputs. They are not judgment. The decision about what claim your first screenshot should make, or which three terms belong in your title, or whether the honest answer is that your listing is fine and your product is the problem, does not come from a dashboard. It comes from a person who has read your reviews and opened your competitors. Tool-led work drifts toward what the tool can measure, which is rankings, and away from what you want, which is installs.

Then there is the ownership. App Radar is now a brand inside SplitMetrics, which also runs its own growth services. Two agency arms inside one software group means account plans, cross-selling and margin targets that serve the group, not your listing. None of this is sinister. It is what acquisitions produce. It does mean the agency you hire is one node in a larger system with its own incentives.

Compare that with hiring one consultant who does not own a tool and does not want to sell you one. I use whatever data source is right for your category, and I hand your team a cheap subscription they can run themselves when we finish. The listing is torn down, rewritten, tested once with a clean hypothesis, and handed over with the reasoning your team will need. The fee is fixed, it ends, and nothing in it is designed to keep you inside a platform.

In fairness: if you already use App Radar’s software, like it, and want the people who built it to run your account in it, the managed service is a coherent choice and the pricing reflects that it is a channel. If you want independent judgment on your listing and the freedom to use any tool afterward, a tool-owned agency is the wrong shape. Send me their proposal and I will show you what the work costs without the subscription attached.