---
title: How Can You Identify Your Apps Direct and Indirect Rivals?
description: Learn how to identify direct and indirect competitors for your app, from store research and user interviews to review mining and rival scoring.
image: https://weareaffective.com/hubfs/learning-centre-images/how-can-you-identify-your-apps-direct-and-indirect-rivals.webp
---

[Skip to content](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/how-can-you-identify-your-apps-direct-and-indirect-rivals#main-content)

[![we\_are\_affective\_logo\_200](https://weareaffective.com/hs-fs/hubfs/we_are_affective_logo_200.png?width=175&height=48&name=we_are_affective_logo_200.png "we_are_affective_logo_200")](https://weareaffective.com)

- [Home](https://weareaffective.com)
- About Us 
  
    - [Our Story](https://weareaffective.com/about)
    - [How We Work](https://weareaffective.com/how-we-work)
- Our Services 
  
    - [App Planning & Strategy](https://weareaffective.com/app-planning-strategy)
    - [App Design](https://weareaffective.com/app-design-agency)
    - [App UX Design](https://weareaffective.com/app-ux-design)
    - [App UI Design](https://weareaffective.com/app-ui-design)
    - [App Technical Architecture](https://weareaffective.com/app-architecture)
    - [Existing App Audits](https://weareaffective.com/app-audit)
- [Case Studies](https://weareaffective.com/case-studies)
- [Pricing](https://weareaffective.com/pricing)
- [Learning Centre](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre)

- [Get Started](https://weareaffective.com/get-started)

Expert Guide Series

# How Can You Identify Your Apps Direct and Indirect Rivals?

 Table of Contents

Open any app store, type in the word that describes your category, and you'll get thousands of results back. That list is where most app competitor analysis begins, and it's also where most of it ends. Teams screenshot the top ten, note the pricing, log the feature grid, and feel like they've done the work.

A person doesn't pick up their phone thinking "I need a habit tracking app". They think "I want to run three times a week and I keep not doing it". Whatever helps them do that is the rival. A group chat with two friends. A note in their calendar. The watch they already own. Or nothing at all, which is the option that wins more often than any app does.

> The rival that wins most often is doing nothing at all, and no category list shows it.

So the useful version of this work is wider than a feature grid and more specific than a market overview. It names who you lose users to, why they go, and what that says about what you build next. Skipping it carries a real cost. Business of Apps reports that [42% of apps fail](https://www.businessofapps.com/insights/top-reasons-why-mobile-apps-fail-to-make-a-mark-in-the-market/) because they launched with no prior market research.

This piece walks through how we'd go about it, from the obvious sources to the ones that take real digging.

## What Counts as a Competitor: Direct, Indirect and Substitute

Three kinds of rival turn up in any honest look at the market, and each one hides in a different place.

Direct competitors do the same job in the same shape. If you've built a skincare routine tracker, another skincare routine tracker is a direct rival. They're easy to find and easy to over-study, because they're the ones your team already talks about in meetings.

Indirect competitors do part of your job, or do a nearby job well enough that people stop needing yours. A general reminders app, a brand's own loyalty app, a creator posting routines on video. None of them appear in your category, and all of them absorb the same minutes.

Substitutes replace the behaviour altogether. Paper, memory, a friend, a habit that doesn't need prompting. People fall back on these constantly, and they cost nothing.

| Type | Does what | Where you find them | Hardest part |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Direct | Same job, same shape | Store category, keyword search | Over-studying them |
| Indirect | Part of the job, or a nearby one | User interviews, forums, screen time | Nobody lists them |
| Substitute | Removes the need entirely | Asking what people did before | Users rarely name it |

Understanding direct and indirect competitors as separate problems keeps you from treating a feature gap and an attention gap as the same thing.

## Starting With the Job Your App Gets Hired For

Before you can say who the rivals are, you have to be honest about what people are actually hiring your app to do. That sounds obvious and it almost never gets written down properly.

We start by [mapping use cases rather than screens](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/what-behavioural-research-looks-like-when-its-done-to-inform-not-to-justify). How has someone arrived at this product? What's their real-world situation, and what emotional state are they carrying in with them? If you focus only on the product and the moment it opens, you're missing a whole load of information that leads up to that. The journey starts before anyone taps the icon, and that's absolutely critical to get right.

#### Write the job as a sentence

Take a wellness supplements app. The job isn't "track supplements". It's closer to "stop me wasting money on things I forget to take". Written that way, the competitor set changes instantly. A pill box on the kitchen counter does that job. So does a subscription that just turns up every month and removes the decision.

Do this for your three or four main use cases. Each sentence gives you a different list of rivals, and the overlap between those lists tells you where your real position sits.

## Design that understands *your* users

We build app experiences around real user behaviour, not assumptions. Research, psychology-driven design and technical specs that turn users into loyal advocates.

[See how we work](https://weareaffective.com/how-we-work) [Get started](https://weareaffective.com/get-started)

No commitment

## Finding Your Direct Rivals: App Store, Search and Category Data

The store is still the best starting point, as long as you treat it as a starting point. Search your main keyword, then search the words your users actually say rather than the words your team uses internally. Those are rarely the same.

#### Where app competitor analysis starts

Keyword competitiveness gives you a sense of how crowded the ground is. A search for "running" on the app stores returns an eye-watering number of results, and AppFigures puts the [competitiveness index at 94%](https://appfigures.com/) with over 11,000 results for that one word. Fighting for that term head-on is a long, expensive project.

Beyond keyword search, look at the "similar apps" and "customers also viewed" rails, the top charts in your subcategory, and the apps that rank for your branded terms in web search. Ranking next to someone matters less than you'd think.

> Ranking next to you is not the same as taking your users away.

Record download estimates, review volume, rating trend, update frequency and pricing model for each. Update frequency is the quiet one. An app shipping every fortnight is a different kind of threat to one that hasn't been touched in a year.

## Uncovering Indirect Rivals: Adjacent Tools, Workarounds and Doing Nothing

Indirect rivals don't announce themselves, so you have to go and find the behaviour instead of the brand. The question that works is simple. Before this app existed, how did people get this done?

For a home interiors app, the answer includes saved photos, a shared album with a partner, a tab left open for three weeks, and a note on the fridge. For a [fitness brand, it includes a watch](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/fitness-app-trends-2026-what-users-really-want-from-their-workout-apps), a spreadsheet, and a mate who texts on a Sunday night. These workarounds are free, already installed, and emotionally comfortable.

Ask new users what they had open on their phone the last time they tried to do this. The answer names your indirect competitors faster than any market report.

Then there's doing nothing, which deserves its own line in the analysis. Plenty of people decide the job isn't worth the effort of learning a new tool. They don't churn in a dramatic way. They just stop opening it and the habit quietly dissolves.

Treating inertia as a competitor changes what you build. You stop adding features to beat a rival app and start [removing the friction that sends people back](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/what-are-the-most-common-mistakes-startups-make-when-building-their-first-app) to paper.

## Asking Your Own Users What They Used Instead

Your existing users have already run this research for you. They tried other things before they found you, and some of them are still using those things alongside your app.

Three questions get most of the way there. What were you using before this? What else do you still use for the same thing? If this app disappeared tomorrow, what's the first thing you'd do? That last one surfaces substitutes that no [app user research](https://weareaffective.com/app-user-research) survey question about "competitors" will ever reach.

Run these in short calls rather than forms. People give you the tidy answer in a form and the true answer in conversation, usually about four minutes in when they stop performing.

#### Clients count as users too

When we play a change back to a client, their immediate reaction tells us a lot before any wider study starts. Asking "how does that feel to you?" is a natural step, and it works the same way with competitor work. Show a founder a rival's onboarding and watch their face. The flinch is data.

Keep notes verbatim. The words people use for the job are the words that belong in your store listing later.

## Mining Reviews, Forums and Support Tickets for Named Alternatives

Reviews are the cheapest competitor research available, with one caveat worth holding in mind. People are very quick to review after a bad experience. Positive feedback feels to them like it mostly benefits the company, so they skip it. What you're reading is skewed towards frustration, which is fine as long as you read it that way.

Ministry of Programming suggests working through [fifty to one hundred of the most recent reviews](https://ministryofprogramming.com/blog/how-to-perform-app-competitor-analysis-complete-guide) from each of your top five rivals. Sort by most recent rather than most helpful, because the helpful ones are often years old and describe a product that no longer exists.

What you're looking for is named alternatives. "Switched from X", "went back to Y", "just use the built-in one now". Each of those sentences hands you a competitor you hadn't listed.

Support tickets do the same job for your own product. Look at the requests coming in and ask whether a common theme is emerging, then unpick that back to a particular problem or point of confusion in the app. Repeat tickets about the same screen often mean people are mentally comparing you to something smoother they already use.

Forums, subreddits and comment sections under reviews of your category round it out.

## The Research Toolkit: What to Use and What It Actually Tells You

Tools speed this up, and every one of them answers a narrow question. Buying three of them doesn't give you a strategy, it gives you three dashboards.

> Tools tell you what people do. Only people tell you why they stopped.

Here's roughly how we'd split them.

| Source | Answers | Doesn't answer |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Store intelligence tools | Scale, ranking, keyword difficulty | Why anyone downloads |
| Review mining | Recurring complaints, named switches | What quiet users think |
| Ad libraries | Positioning and promises | Whether the promise holds up |
| User interviews | Jobs, workarounds, feelings | Market size |
| Hands-on teardowns | Craft, pace, emotional tone | Commercial performance |

Self-reported scores like NPS sit in an awkward spot. They stay relevant, and they're collected after the fact, when someone is calm and analytical rather than in the heightened moment of using the product. Scores that look positive also reflect well upwards through a company, right the way to board level, which is part of why they survive. To genuinely get at user satisfaction, you have to look at real instances in real time.

## Running a Teardown of a Rival App

Download the rival. Use it as a first-time user, with your phone on a slow connection, and don't skip anything. Then do it again a week later as a returning user, because those are two completely different products.

We time the teardown against the windows where apps lose people.

1. First three or four seconds. Load speed, any lag, crashes, the weight of the download itself.
2. Sixty to one hundred and twenty seconds. Forced registration, tutorial screens stacked up, [permissions requested with no explanation](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/what-a-fitness-social-app-changed-when-it-realised-precise-location-was-the-wron), and whether any value has been shown yet.
3. First three days. Whether anything brings you back, and whether a cost appears that wasn't mentioned up front.
4. Week two onwards. Battery, storage, notification tone, and whether the job still feels worth doing.

Forcing people to register before they've seen anything useful is one of the most reliable ways to lose them early, and it's still everywhere. If a rival does it, that's a gap you can take.

Write the teardown as a narrative rather than a checklist. "By screen four I'd been asked for my email, my location and my birthday, and still didn't know what the app did" is far more useful to a product team than a row in a grid marked "onboarding: average".

## Competing for Attention, Not Just Function

Feature grids assume people choose products rationally, comparing capabilities. Phones don't work like that. Your rival for the ten minutes before bed is a video app, a messaging thread and whatever's on the television.

People get engaged with emotional products, not functional ones. So the measures that matter are session time, how often someone comes back, what they say about the product on social media, and how they refer it to other people. Those behaviours come from [emotional connection rather than a flat](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/what-features-must-your-social-media-app-include-to-succeed) "this works for me, it's not a big deal".

Compare rivals on return frequency and session length, not feature count. An app with fewer features and more returns is beating you.

Looked at this way, a pet care app isn't only competing with other pet care apps. It's competing with the dog owner's camera roll, the WhatsApp group where everyone posts photos, and the vet's text reminders. All three already have the attention.

Ask which of your rivals people talk about unprompted. That's usually a shorter list than your competitor set, and it's the one that matters.

## Benchmarking How Rival Apps Make People Feel

Function is easy to compare. Feeling takes more care, and it's where most competitor work stops short.

In the first thirty seconds of a product, [people are assessing a lot at once](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/how-to-map-the-emotional-journey-from-first-purchase-to-reorder-and-where-most-l), consciously and subconsciously. Is this trustworthy? Is it high quality, or has it been put together hastily? Do I understand what it does? What's going to be asked of me, how long will this take, and where am I in the process? Score your rivals on those questions after half a minute, before you know anything else about the app.

Then look at [micro-interactions](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/what-are-the-best-examples-of-micro-interactions-in-popular-apps). In a conversation we pick up a huge amount from the visual side, the raise of an eyebrow, the slight smile, the small gestures that sit between the words. Micro-interactions do that job in a product, conveying extra meaning and emotion in between the obvious communications. A rival with warm, well-timed small moments feels more considered, even with fewer features.

Note the emotional state each app expects you to arrive in. A high-anxiety moment needs simplifying and layering, reducing that heightened level through education. An app that dumps everything on one screen has designed for the product, rather than the person.

## Building Your Competitor Map and Scoring Threat Levels

Now you've got a long list, and long lists go stale in a drawer. Cut it down to something you'll actually use.

Plot rivals on two lines. One for how closely they serve the same job, one for how much attention they take. A substitute that takes very little effort and serves the job adequately belongs in the top-right corner, even though it isn't an app and has no funding.

> A rival who serves the same feeling beats one who copies the same features.

Then score each one on a handful of things. How many of your users mention them unprompted. How fast they ship. How strong their emotional pull is. Whether they're growing in your market or drifting. Three bands is enough, since finer scoring creates false precision and arguments about half points.

For review-based signals, Ministry of Programming treats a complaint appearing in [15% of reviews](https://ministryofprogramming.com/blog/how-to-perform-app-competitor-analysis-complete-guide) as worth investigating. It's an editorial rule of thumb rather than a finding from a study, and as a trigger for a closer look it's a sensible one.

Keep the map to one page. If it needs scrolling, nobody reads it twice.

## Turning the Analysis Into Product and Positioning Decisions

Research that doesn't change a roadmap was a hobby. The point of all of this is to make two or three decisions you'd otherwise have made on instinct.

A good one we use here is the eulogy game. Fast-forward twenty or thirty years to when your product no longer exists, and give a eulogy for it as if it were a person. What did it bring to the world? How did it make people feel? What lasting impression did users have, and what legacy does it leave? By focusing on the end of the product artificially, you tend to focus in on the things you should really be building in from the start.

Run that alongside your competitor map and the gaps get obvious. If the eulogy you want nobody could give to your closest rival, you've found your position. If it reads like theirs, you've found a problem.

Structured work here shows up in survival odds too. Meegle reports that startups using structured competitive analysis are [20% more likely to survive beyond year five](https://www.meegle.com/en_us/topics/entrepreneurship/startup-competitive-analysis), with no sample size stated, so treat it as directional rather than precise.

Write the decisions down as sentences. Build this, stop that, say this instead.

## Keeping the Picture Current: Monitoring Without Drowning in It

A competitor picture goes out of date in about a quarter. Watching it daily is worse than useless, because you end up reacting to every release a rival ships and your roadmap turns into somebody else's.

A rhythm that holds up looks like this.

1. Weekly, skim new reviews for your top three rivals, ten minutes maximum.
2. Monthly, check ranking movement and any new entrants in your subcategory.
3. Quarterly, redo one full teardown on whichever rival has changed most.
4. Yearly, rebuild the map from scratch and challenge who's even on it.

Give one named person the quarterly teardown. Shared ownership of monitoring means nobody does it.

Set alerts for your rivals' brand names alongside words like "alternative" and "switched from". Those searches pick up the moments when people are actively comparing, which is when their reasoning is clearest.

Visibility is scarcer than it sounds. Meegle also reports that [44% of startups](https://www.meegle.com/en_us/topics/entrepreneurship/startup-competitive-analysis) have almost no view of their rivals at all. A light, regular habit puts you ahead of a lot of the market for a few hours a month.

## Common Mistakes in App Competitor Analysis

Most of the ways this goes wrong are familiar, and they're all fixable.

- Studying only direct rivals, so the thing people actually use instead never appears.
- Building a feature grid and calling it finished, with no note on how anything feels.
- Copying a bigger rival's design, inheriting problems they're already trying to fix.
- Reading reviews from three years ago that describe a product that's since been rebuilt.
- Treating the analysis as a one-off document rather than something you revisit.

There's one more worth naming. Teams often research competitors to justify a decision they've already made, and the research obediently agrees. If your competitor work has never changed your mind about anything, it probably isn't research.

The other common slip is scope. A founder with a pre-launch product doesn't need forty competitors mapped across nine dimensions. Five rivals understood properly, including one substitute and one case of people simply doing nothing, will tell them more than a spreadsheet nobody opens after the funding round closes.

Depth beats coverage every time here.

## Conclusion

Good app competitor analysis asks a human question rather than a market one. What is this person trying to get done, what else helps them do it, and how does each option make them feel while they're doing it? Answer that and the list of rivals builds itself, including the ones that never appear in a store category.

The work has a shape. Write down the job, find the direct rivals in the obvious places, then go looking for the indirect and substitute ones in reviews, interviews and support tickets. Tear down the best of them with the honest eye of a first-time user. Score what you find, keep the map to one page, and let it change two or three real decisions.

Then leave it alone until next quarter. The temptation to watch rivals constantly ends with a product that follows rather than leads, and the apps people stay with are the ones that know exactly what they're for.

If you're trying to work out who you're really up against, and what that means for what you build next, we're happy to talk it through. [Let's talk about your app's real competition](https://weareaffective.com/get-started).

## Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between a direct, indirect and substitute competitor?

Direct competitors do the same job in the same shape, such as one skincare routine tracker against another. Indirect competitors do part of your job or a nearby one, like a general reminders app or a creator posting routines on video, while substitutes remove the need altogether, such as paper, memory or a friend.

Why isn't searching the app store enough for competitor analysis?

A store category only surfaces products that have classified themselves the same way you have, so you get the obvious direct rivals and nothing else. The things actually taking your users' attention, including doing nothing at all, never appear on that list.

Why does the article say doing nothing is the biggest rival?

People don't open their phone looking for a category, they are trying to solve a real-life problem, and the most common outcome is that they don't solve it with any app. Because inaction costs nothing and appears in no ranking, it beats most products more often than any named competitor does.

How do I work out what job my app is actually hired to do?

Write the job down as a plain sentence describing the user's real situation rather than the feature set. For a supplements app, that might be "stop me wasting money on things I forget to take" rather than simply "track supplements".

Where can I find indirect competitors if they don't show up in my category?

They surface in user interviews, community forums and screen time data, because these show what people genuinely reach for instead of your app. Asking what someone did before they found you is one of the fastest ways to name them.

What is the risk of focusing too heavily on direct competitors?

Direct rivals are easy to study and easy to over-study, which tends to turn competitor analysis into a feature grid. That approach confuses a feature gap with an attention gap, and the two require completely different responses.

Why does the article stress mapping use cases rather than screens?

If you only look at the product from the moment it opens, you miss everything that led the person there, including their situation and emotional state. The journey begins before anyone taps the icon, and understanding that context is what reveals the real alternatives.

What happens to apps that skip market research altogether?

Business of Apps reports that 42% of apps fail because they launched with no prior market research. Understanding who you lose users to, and why, directly shapes what you should build next.

## Related Articles

[![How to Check if Your App Idea Exists?](https://weareaffective.com/hubfs/learning-centre-images/how-to-check-if-your-app-idea-exists.webp)](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/how-to-check-if-your-app-idea-exists)

### [How to Check if Your App Idea Exists?](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/how-to-check-if-your-app-idea-exists)

A pre-launch founder in the football industry came to us with a colour-coded spreadsheet. Every...

by [Simon Lee](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/author/simon-lee)

[![How Much Does It Cost to Keep Your App Compliant](https://weareaffective.com/hubfs/learning-centre-images/how-much-does-it-cost-to-keep-your-app-compliant.webp)](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/how-much-does-it-cost-to-keep-your-app-compliant)

### [How Much Does It Cost to Keep Your App Compliant](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/how-much-does-it-cost-to-keep-your-app-compliant)

We worked on a currency exchange app that never made it onto the store. The client did everything...

by [Simon Lee](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/author/simon-lee)

[![When should you spend more on your app?](https://weareaffective.com/hubfs/learning-centre-images/when-should-you-spend-more-on-your-app.webp)](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/when-should-you-spend-more-on-your-app)

### [When should you spend more on your app?](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/when-should-you-spend-more-on-your-app)

A client came to us once with a music app they had spent months building. The content was good, the...

by [Simon Lee](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/author/simon-lee)

[![We Are Affective](https://weareaffective.com/hubfs/we_are_affective_logo_mark.svg)](https://weareaffective.com)

20-22 Wenlock Road  
London, N1 7GU  
United Kingdom

+44 20 4572 8062  
[hello@weareaffective.com](mailto:hello@weareaffective.com)

<https://linkedin.com/company/weareaffective> <https://instagram.com/weareaffective> <https://facebook.com/weareaffective>

Services

[App planning & strategy](https://weareaffective.com/app-planning-strategy) [App design](https://weareaffective.com/app-design-agency) [App UX design](https://weareaffective.com/app-ux-design) [App UI design](https://weareaffective.com/app-ui-design) [App technical architecture](https://weareaffective.com/app-architecture) [Existing app audits](https://weareaffective.com/app-audit)

Legal

[Privacy policy](https://app.termly.io/policy-viewer/policy.html?policyUUID=b8fa9921-7518-4fb5-8ddd-9dc7f5977ed2) [Terms](https://app.termly.io/policy-viewer/policy.html?policyUUID=8b6a6ad5-91bd-4176-a5f7-6d36b0398f70)

Case studies

[TravAI](https://weareaffective.com/case-studies/travai) [Meditech](https://weareaffective.com/case-studies/harley) [WorkingWeight](https://weareaffective.com/case-studies/workingweight) [SkinSync](https://weareaffective.com/case-studies/skinsync) [Three Lochs](https://weareaffective.com/case-studies/three-lochs) [Drift](https://weareaffective.com/case-studies/drift)

About us

[Our Story](https://weareaffective.com/about) [How We Work](https://weareaffective.com/how-we-work)

Guides

[Creating an app](https://weareaffective.com/how-to-create-an-app) [Building an MVP](https://weareaffective.com/building-an-mvp) [Cost and budgeting](https://weareaffective.com/app-development-cost) [App technology](https://weareaffective.com/app-development) [Planning and strategy](https://weareaffective.com/app-planning-strategy) [User research](https://weareaffective.com/app-user-research) [Onboarding design](https://weareaffective.com/app-onboarding-design) [User psychology](https://weareaffective.com/user-psychology-app-design) [Launch and growth](https://weareaffective.com/app-launch-growth)

 Copyright © 2026, weareaffective.com. All rights reserved.