Back My Side Review: The ASO Tool That Shows Its Work (2026)

Quick answer: Back My Side is an App Store Optimization tool for iOS apps. Paste an App Store link and it returns a listing score, keyword recommendations, competitor terms, and daily rank tracking across 15+ storefronts. Its pitch is transparency: keyword signals come from Apple's public search results and autocomplete, and every recommendation shows the evidence behind it instead of a black-box volume number. The first report is free with no account. Paid plans run $15, $25, and $49 a month after a $1 three-day trial. It's App Store only, so Google Play teams should look elsewhere.

We make SnapMonk, which has its own ASO report and rank tracker. So yes, this is a review of a tool that overlaps with ours. I still think it's worth writing, because Back My Side takes a stance on keyword data that most of the industry avoids, and if you're picking an ASO tool in 2026 you should understand that stance before you pay anyone.

I ran a few of our own apps and a handful of top-charting habit trackers through it over a couple of evenings. What follows is what I found.

What Back My Side actually is

The tagline is "App Store intelligence, starting with a link." That's accurate. The whole product is organized around one input, an App Store URL, and four outputs:

1. A listing analysis with a score and a list of recommendations.
2. Keyword research built on what Apple's search actually returns.
3. A rank tracker that checks your position daily and keeps 90 days of history.
4. A "listing studio" for rewriting your subtitle inside Apple's 30-character limit.

There's also a standalone Keyword Explorer where you type a term instead of an app, pick one of a dozen storefronts, and see who ranks for it plus the autocomplete suggestions around it.

No Google Play. No ad intelligence. No revenue estimates. It's a focused tool, and the focus is the point.

The thing that makes it different: no invented volume

Most ASO tools show you a "search volume" or "popularity" score for each keyword. Apple doesn't publish search volume, so those numbers are models. Some are decent models. None of them are measurements.

Back My Side refuses to play that game. Its keyword guide says it plainly: "Sampled positions are not official on-device ranks, and relative scores are not search-volume counts." Instead of a volume estimate, it shows you the evidence it collected. Which apps appear in the top 200 for the term. How crowded the result set is. Whether your app's category and copy actually match what the search is asking for. Then it scores demand, competition, and opportunity on a 0 to 100 scale and lets you inspect why.

The homepage line is "Reasons you can inspect. Not a mysterious volume score." After using it for a week, I'd say that holds up. When it told one of our apps to go after a term, I could click through and see the exact result page it based that on.

Is this better than a good volume model? Depends on what you're doing. If you're an indie dev trying to decide between eight subtitle candidates, seeing the actual competitive set for each one is more useful than a number you can't verify. If you're an agency reporting to a client who wants a volume column in a spreadsheet, you'll miss it.

Walking through a report

I pasted the URL for a mid-tier habit tracker. Here's what came back, roughly in order.

The listing score landed first. It flagged that the subtitle repeated a word from the title, which wastes characters Apple already indexes, and suggested two rewrites. Both fit in 30 characters. Both read like a human wrote them.

Then the keyword list. On the free tier, two keywords are fully measured and the rest are blurred. On Starter you see 20. Growth and Scale show everything. Each keyword carries the three scores plus a sampled position, meaning where the app showed up in Apple's top 200 for that term when the tool last checked.

Competitor terms came next. It pulls the apps that rank alongside you and surfaces the vocabulary they use that you don't. Starter caps this at 20 terms from five competitors. Growth and up call it "full competitor gaps and vocabulary" and lift the cap.

The multi-market section is where it got interesting. The same app had a strong position in the US and nothing in Japan or Brazil, and the tool showed the storefront-by-storefront gap on one screen. If you've read our piece on why screenshot localization matters, you already know that gap usually means a localization job, not a keyword job.

Rank tracking

Once you sign in and pin a keyword, tracking starts. Checks run daily against the App Store top 200 for each storefront you care about. History is viewable at 7, 30, and 90 days, and you can overlay competitors who rank for the same term.

It does what it says. The limits are the thing to watch. Free gets you one saved app and five tracked keywords. Starter is 30 keywords, Growth is 100, Scale is 500. Thirty keywords is enough for one app if you're disciplined about which ones matter. It is not enough if you want to track a whole category.

Pricing

Every paid plan starts with a $1 three-day trial and includes 90-day rank history. The site notes that fair-use caps apply on all plans. Prices were current when I checked in September 2026; confirm on their pricing page before you buy.

For an indie developer with one app, Starter is the realistic entry point. Growth is the first tier that shows every keyword, which is what you actually want from a research tool, so I'd expect most serious users to land there.

Where it's strong

The transparency is real and it changes how you use the tool. You stop asking "is this score right" and start asking "does my app belong in this result set," which is the better question anyway.

The multi-storefront view is genuinely good. Fifteen-plus markets on one screen with sampled positions for each is more than most tools at this price give you.

The listing studio is small but useful. Subtitle rewrites that respect the character limit and avoid title duplication save a real ten minutes per iteration.

And the free report needs no account. You can evaluate the tool against your own app in about a minute, which is how it should be.

Where it falls short

It's App Store only. If your revenue is on Google Play, this tool has nothing for you.

Sampled positions are not device ranks. The tool is honest about this, but it means a keyword can show "position 8" in the report and sit at 12 on your phone. Treat the numbers as a consistent relative measure, not ground truth.

The Starter plan is tight. Twenty visible keywords and one saved app is fine for evaluation and thin for real work. Budget for Growth.

No creative or conversion side. It'll tell you what to rank for. It won't help with the screenshots that convert the tap once you're ranking. That's a different job and, to be fair, not one it claims to do.

Back My Side vs SnapMonk ASO

Here's how I'd draw the line, trying to be fair to both.

Both tools start from an App Store URL and return keyword ideas with live position checks. Both have a free first report. Both are aimed at indie developers and small teams rather than enterprise buyers.

Back My Side goes deeper on the research side: the evidence-based scoring, the competitor vocabulary gaps, the fifteen-storefront comparison, the subtitle studio. If keyword research is the whole job, it's the more complete research tool of the two.

SnapMonk ASO is built as the front half of a pipeline that ends in a screenshot set. You run the report, pick your keywords, then carry them straight into the screenshot generator so the captions on your first three frames match what people searched for. The research is lighter than Back My Side's. The distance from "keyword list" to "shipped listing" is shorter.

Plenty of teams will want both. Research in Back My Side, execute in SnapMonk. The two don't fight.

Who should use it

Use Back My Side if you're an iOS developer who has been burned by volume scores that didn't pan out, you sell in more than one storefront, and you want a keyword tool that shows its evidence. Start with the free report, and if the recommendations make sense for your app, Growth is the plan to buy.

Skip it if you're primarily on Google Play, if you need ad or revenue intelligence, or if your team's reporting depends on a volume column.

Either way, the keyword research is only half the work. Our ASO checklist covers what to do with the list once you have it.

FAQ

What is Back My Side? Back My Side is an App Store Optimization tool for iOS apps. You paste an App Store link and it returns a listing score with recommendations, keyword research built on Apple's public search results, competitor terms, and daily rank tracking across 15+ storefronts. It positions itself against black-box ASO tools by showing the evidence behind every recommendation instead of an estimated search volume.

Is Back My Side free? The first report is free and requires no account. Two keywords are fully measured and the rest are blurred. Signing in on the free tier gets you one saved app and five tracked keywords. Paid plans are Starter at $15 a month, Growth at $25, and Scale at $49, each starting with a $1 three-day trial.

Does Back My Side support Google Play? No. Back My Side covers the Apple App Store only. If you need Google Play keyword research or rank tracking, use a different tool.

How does Back My Side get keyword data without search volume? It samples Apple's actual search results and autocomplete suggestions for each term and storefront, then scores demand, competition, and opportunity on a 0 to 100 scale based on what it observed. The tool is explicit that sampled positions are not official on-device ranks and its scores are not search-volume counts.

How is Back My Side different from SnapMonk ASO? Both start from an App Store URL and return keywords with live position checks, and both have a free first report. Back My Side goes deeper on research with evidence-based scoring, competitor vocabulary gaps, multi-storefront comparison, and a subtitle studio. SnapMonk ASO is lighter on research and connects directly to a screenshot generator so the keywords you pick end up in your store listing faster. Many teams can use both.

What is the best Back My Side plan for an indie developer? Growth at $25 a month. It's the first tier that shows every keyword in the report and lifts the competitor caps, with 10 saved apps and 100 tracked keywords. Starter at $15 works for evaluating the tool on one app but its 20-keyword limit gets tight for real research.

Related reading

• Best ASO tools for indie app developers: the full roundup, including where Back My Side sits
• ASO keyword research walkthrough: the SnapMonk research workflow step by step
• Where to put ASO keywords in your listing: title, subtitle, description, screenshots
• The ASO checklist: 20 steps from keyword list to shipped listing
• Why screenshot localization matters: what to do when a storefront gap shows up