appindex

appindex

appindex is a small local bridge to the hosted AppNiche MCP server, which exposes live App Store and Google Play data. Search both stores across more than twenty-five filters, pull one app's full record, read its historical metrics and its listing-change timeline, score keywords for difficulty and opportunity, read app reviews, and list the supported country codes — all from your agent, with no local copy of the catalogue.

The bridge keeps no app data of its own. It serves the upstream server's tool list locally, exactly as captured from the live endpoint, and forwards each tool call upstream, returning the result untouched. A few tools state a per-call credit cost in their descriptions; those credits are charged by the upstream service against the caller's own pre-existing AppNiche account. There is no tool here that buys credits, creates an account, or mints a key, and the bridge adds none.

Tools

• search_apps — search App Store and Google Play apps across filters for store, category, games and game genres, language (including a not_languages localization-gap filter), price model, rating, review count, download and revenue estimates, release and update recency, and review-growth direction, sorted by any column. Every filter is optional.
• get_app_detail — return one app's full record. Required: app_id (a canonical id such as "apple:284882215" or "google:com.spotify.music", a bare Apple track id, an Android package name, or a store URL).
• get_app_historicals — return historical metric points for one app, daily up to 90 days and weekly beyond. Required: store_id. Optional: store, days.
• get_app_timeline — return one app's listing change history, newest first: versions, icon and screenshot redesigns, price and business-model changes, renames, category moves, description rewrites and more, grouped by day. Required: store_id. Optional: store, days, before.
• get_keyword_difficulty — score one keyword for difficulty and opportunity on the App Store or Google Play. Required: keyword. Optional: store, country, language.
• batch_keyword_difficulty — score up to 10 keywords in one call. Required: keywords. Optional: store, country, language.
• get_app_reviews — read app reviews: pass app_id for live store reviews of any app, or omit it to read the workspace's tracked apps with sentiment, topics and improvement areas attached. Every argument is optional.
• get_supported_countries — return the supported country codes. Takes no arguments.

Configuration

• APPNICHE_MCP_URL (optional) — override the upstream endpoint. Defaults to https://api.getappniche.com/mcp. (The override hook is this rebuild's own labelled reconstruction.)
• GETAPPNICHE_API_KEY (optional) — when set, every upstream request carries an Authorization: Bearer <key> header, for the caller's own AppNiche key created in their AppNiche dashboard settings. When it is not set, no key header is sent. (The header name and the env name are pinned by the original's registry record; the Bearer scheme and this env forwarding are labelled reconstructions — the original surface was captured keyless.)

Forwarding mechanics

On the first tool call the client opens a streamable HTTP session with the upstream: a JSON-RPC initialize request (protocolVersion 2025-03-26, clientInfo name appindex), then a notifications/initialized notification, then the tools/call request carrying the caller's arguments unchanged. When the upstream answers initialize with an Mcp-Session-Id header, that value rides on every later request of the session, which is reused for the life of the process. Replies may arrive as plain JSON or as server-sent events; both are read.

Successful upstream results pass through verbatim, including any isError flag the upstream sets. Failures — a JSON-RPC error, a non-2xx status, an unreadable response, or a request that cannot be completed — come back as an isError result whose text starts with appindex error: (this rendering is this rebuild's own labelled reconstruction).

CLI

Each tool is also a subcommand taking one JSON argument string:

npx @reneturcios/appindex search_apps '{"search":"calorie tracker","store":"apple","limit":10}'
npx @reneturcios/appindex get_app_detail '{"app_id":"apple:284882215"}'
npx @reneturcios/appindex get_keyword_difficulty '{"keyword":"habit tracker"}'
npx @reneturcios/appindex get_supported_countries
npx @reneturcios/appindex --version

Exit codes: 0 on success, 1 on an isError result, 2 on a usage error.

MCP server

npx -y @reneturcios/appindex mcp

MCP client config:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "appindex": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@reneturcios/appindex", "mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Docker

docker run -i ghcr.io/cloudcorprecords/appindex
docker run --rm ghcr.io/cloudcorprecords/appindex --version

The container's default command is mcp, so the first form is a stdio MCP server; any other arguments reach the CLI normally.

Development

npm install
npm run build
npm test
npm run dev

The test suite runs entirely against a stubbed JSON-RPC upstream — no live network calls.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.