Monday, July 9, 2012

Download iTunes Connect sales reports with Autoindigestion

When you start selling your first app in the app store, it's very exciting to check you sales every day in iTunes Connect. After the initial excitement wears off and your app sales settle into a steady state, it's easy to get involved in your next project and forget to log into iTunes Connect periodically to download your daily or weekly sales reports. Apple only makes the last 14 days of daily reports and the last 13 weeks of weekly reports available; if you're not diligent, time can fly by and you will lose important sales records.

Apple does provide a tool to automate the retrieval of iTunes Connect sales reports: the Auto-Ingest tool, a small Java command line app. While it's good that Apple provides an officially supported tool, it's a very minimal one. The Auto-Ingest tool only downloads one report at a time and doesn't have any intelligence for determining which reports have already been downloaded, nor can it handle downloading multiple report types or multiple iTunes Connect vendor accounts without some scripting help. Enter Autoindigestion.

Autoindigestion is a command line utility for Mac OS X Lion that uses the Auto-Ingest tool to automatically download daily and weekly sales reports. The first time it runs, Autoindigestion will grab all available reports; on subsequent runs it will download new reports based on the current date and the dates of previously downloaded reports. If you miss a day because your system is off or iTunes Connect reports are delayed, Autoindigestion will catch up the next time it runs. Autoindigestion can also be configured to handle multiple iTunes Connect vendors, which is great if you handle sales reporting for clients.

Autoindigestion is open source and available under a BSD style license. It's currently available as source from the Autoindigestion GitHub page. It is a native OS X command line program written in Objective-C and requires Xcode to build. Complete instructions for installing and configuring Autoindigestion are included on the GitHub page. I enjoyed creating Autoindigestion and hope you find it useful.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Any change that this could be updated to collect the Year reports ?

Anonymous said...

I didn't know Apple had added annual reports. I'll look into it.

Anonymous said...

Okay, working on adding support for monthly and yearly reports. Should be easy to add, hopefully will finish it up next week (unfortunately very time constrained right now).