I had this spreadsheet. You probably have one too.
It started out simple — a Google Sheet with columns for date, app name, source, message, and status. Whenever someone left an App Store review or emailed me about a bug, I'd copy the text into the sheet, add a row, mark it "new."
For about two weeks, this was fine.
Then I launched a second app. Then a third. Suddenly I had reviews coming in across three App Store listings, feedback emails going to two different addresses, and a Google Form I'd set up for beta testers. Five sources. One spreadsheet. Zero motivation to keep it updated.
I know this sounds like a minor inconvenience. It's not. When you're a solo developer — or a team of two — feedback management is the kind of task that never feels urgent but always matters.
You miss the review where someone describes a crash you could have fixed in 20 minutes. You forget to reply to the beta tester who reported a critical bug and now they've lost interest. You have no idea which issues have been resolved and which are still open because your spreadsheet has 200 rows and the "status" column has entries like "maybe fixed?", "ask again", and three empty cells.
Before building anything, I looked at what exists.
AppFollow — Looked great. Then I saw the pricing. $111/month for the base plan. I make indie apps. My total MRR across all three apps was $340. There's no world where I'm spending a third of my revenue on a review management tool.
Appfigures — Better pricing, but it's really an analytics platform. The review management is a feature, not the product. It felt like paying for a Swiss Army knife when I just needed a screwdriver.
A bunch of "feedback tools" — Canny, UserVoice, Featurebase. All designed for SaaS products with thousands of users and product teams. I don't have a product team. I am the product team.
What I actually needed was embarrassingly simple: one inbox where all my app feedback lands, regardless of source. Reviews from the App Store. Messages from a feedback form. Maybe tags so I can tell bugs apart from feature requests. That's it.
I'm a developer. When I can't find the right tool, I build it. (This is both my superpower and my curse.)
The first version was ugly. A Django app with a single page that showed every feedback item in chronological order. App Store reviews came in via the App Store Connect API. Feedback form submissions came in via a simple POST endpoint. Everything landed in the same list.
And it immediately changed how I worked.
Instead of checking three different App Store Connect pages, two email accounts, and a Google Sheet — I opened one tab. Everything was there. New items at the top. I could tag stuff as "bug" or "feature request" or "confused user." I could mark things as "in progress" or "resolved."
It sounds so basic that you might wonder why I'm writing about it. But that's exactly the point. The solution didn't need to be sophisticated. It needed to exist.
Once I had a real inbox, I started noticing patterns I'd been blind to.
Three people across two different apps had reported the same onboarding confusion — but the reports came in from different sources over different weeks, so I'd never connected them. In the spreadsheet, they were just three unrelated rows. In the inbox, with tags, the pattern was obvious.
I also discovered that my feedback form was generating 4x more actionable reports than my App Store reviews. Reviews are emotional and vague. Form submissions — when the form asks the right questions — are specific and useful. I'd been over-indexing on App Store reviews and under-indexing on direct feedback.
I cleaned up the tool, gave it a name, and opened it up because I figured other indie devs were dealing with the same mess.
It's not trying to be AppFollow. It doesn't do ASO. It doesn't have AI-powered sentiment analysis with machine learning blockchain synergy. It does one thing: it gives you an inbox for your app feedback, from all your sources, in one place.
Free tier for your first app. $19/mo if you need more. That's it.
If you're still using a spreadsheet — I get it. I was there. But there's a better way, and it doesn't have to cost $100/month.
That's why I built AppTriage — a review management inbox with a built-in feedback form, QR codes, and legal page generator. One place for everything. Free for your first app.
