Who makes AppGlance, and why
AppGlance is made by Ludyem AS, a small limited company in Norway, by an indie developer who ships nine apps of their own. It exists because we wanted to open a page and see who was in our apps right now, and every tool that could show us either wanted a query language, an ad identifier, or both.
An indie studio in Norway, one dashboard, two open-source SDKs, a database in Ireland, and a business model that is the pricing page and nothing else. We use it on our own apps first.
Why it exists
The questions we actually asked about our own apps were small: who is in the app right now, who installed today, who just bought, and do people come back. The tools that could answer them were built for a different job. Firebase wanted us to be Google's customer as much as Google's user. The web-style dashboards wanted us to write queries. And most of them quietly assumed an advertising identifier and a consent banner we did not want to ship.
So we built the glance we wanted: a live count per app, a feed you read as a story, a push on the phone when someone buys, and answers to Apple's and Google's privacy questionnaires written out for you. It ran on our own apps first, and it was opened up when it had been boring for long enough to trust.
Who is behind it
AppGlance is operated by Ludyem AS, a limited company registered in Norway. It is an indie studio: the same people who ship the apps write the SDKs, run the service and answer the support address. The terms of use, the privacy policy and the data processing agreement are all with that company, and they say what this page says in the language a lawyer would want.
Made by an indie, for indies. The plans are priced for one person's side project and one small studio's whole catalogue, and the free tier is meant to be launched on, not outgrown in a week. Presence pings, the chatty part of app analytics, are never billed at all.
How it is built, and where the data lives
- Two SDKs. Swift for iOS, macOS, tvOS, watchOS and visionOS, and Kotlin for Android. About 200 KB compiled on iOS, no third-party dependencies, one line to configure. Anything else can send events over the HTTP API.
- An ingest endpoint at the network edge. Events arrive at a Cloudflare Worker, which validates the write key, drops duplicates and stores them.
- A Postgres database in the EU. Hosted by Supabase in Ireland (AWS eu-west-1). Row-level security keeps one developer's data invisible to every other developer.
- A dashboard that runs in the browser and works well on a phone. A native iPhone app for alerts is in development; until it ships, alerts reach any phone through ntfy or Discord, or your own server through a signed webhook.
The full description of what is collected, what is never collected, and how deletion works is in the privacy policy. The security measures and the list of sub-processors are in the DPA.
What we will never do
- Sell or share your users' data. We are a processor acting on your instructions. We do not profile, advertise, train models on it, or combine data across different developers' apps.
- Collect an advertising identifier, GPS location or a fingerprint. The SDK never asks for ATT permission because it never needs it.
- Write IP addresses into the analytics database. The one exception is the country option: where you turn it on, the edge reads the address only far enough to derive a two-letter country, and the address goes no further.
- Name a user without you deciding to. Every install gets a random id and stays anonymous unless
your code calls
identify. When it does, the dashboard tells you what changes on your App Store label before you ship.
What is open, and what is not
Both SDKs are open source under the MIT licence: appglance-apple (Swift) and appglance-android (Kotlin). You can read every byte that ends up in your binary, and each repository keeps a changelog and publishes GitHub Releases for every version. The server side, the ingest Worker and the database schema, is not published; AppGlance is a hosted service. If open source end to end is a requirement, Aptabase is the honest recommendation, and we say so on that page.
How to reach a human
[email protected] reaches the people who build it, not a queue. Bugs in the SDKs are welcome as issues on the repositories above. If a comparison page has got a competitor wrong, or a claim on this site has drifted from the truth, tell us and we will fix the page rather than argue.
Anything else worth knowing is dated on the changelog.
See it rather than read about it
The demo is the real dashboard on sample data from four apps. No account, nothing to install.