I Can Finally See My Download Numbers

For a while I had no idea how many people were actually downloading Netutil or Soundshine. The App Store gives you some numbers, but they are delayed, coarse, and hard to act on. I wanted to know what was happening on my own app sites in real time.

The obvious answer is Google Analytics. I’ve used it before. It works, but it means dropping a heavy script on your visitors and putting their data in Google’s hands. For apps that are privacy-focused by design, that felt like a bad look.

So I started looking for something better and landed on Abner.

Abner is an analytics platform built around a simple idea: track what matters, collect nothing personal. No cookies, no fingerprinting, no consent banners. It loads a script under 2KB and gives you real-time data on visitors, page views, traffic sources, and more. It is GDPR and CCPA compliant out of the box, not as an afterthought.

Setup was genuinely one line of code. I had it running on both sites in under ten minutes.

Now I can actually see when a blog post sends traffic to Netutil or Soundshine. I can see where visitors are coming from, which pages they hit, and how things change week over week. That kind of visibility makes a real difference when you are trying to figure out if your marketing is doing anything at all.

If you are an indie developer or running a small SaaS, I think Abner is worth a serious look. It does the job without compromising your users, and the pricing is reasonable for what you get. Check it out at abner.app.