Pp Sensortower

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Sensor Tower — Printing Press CLI

Prerequisites: Install the CLI

This skill drives the sensortower-pp-cli binary. You must verify the CLI is installed before invoking any command from this skill. If it is missing, install it first:

1. Install via the Printing Press installer. It defaults binaries to $HOME/.local/bin on macOS/Linux and %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\PrintingPress\bin on Windows:

   npx -y @mvanhorn/printing-press-library install sensortower --cli-only

2. Verify: sensortower-pp-cli --version
3. Ensure the reported install directory is on $PATH for the agent/runtime that will invoke this skill.

If the npx install fails (no Node, offline, etc.), fall back to a direct Go install (requires Go 1.26.6 or newer). This installs into $GOPATH/bin (default $HOME/go/bin), so add that directory to $PATH instead:

go install github.com/mvanhorn/printing-press-library/library/marketing/sensortower/cmd/sensortower-pp-cli@latest

If --version reports "command not found" after install, the runtime cannot see the binary directory on $PATH. Do not proceed with skill commands until verification succeeds.

Sensor Tower's dashboard shows you a rank right now and keeps no history you can query. This CLI mirrors app profiles, top charts, and publisher portfolios into local SQLite, then answers the questions the web UI structurally cannot: what moved since last week (movers), which release actually shifted the chart (teardown), and how the same product stands on iOS versus Android (compare). Ranks are exact and free; the revenue estimates are coarse buckets, so the commands lean on rank movement and never dress a bucket up as a precise figure.

When to Use This CLI

Use this CLI for mobile app market intelligence questions grounded in store rankings: where an app sits in a category chart, how that position moved over time, which release preceded a move, and how a product compares across iOS and Android. It is strongest when the question involves change over time, because it keeps a local history that Sensor Tower's dashboard does not. It works on a free Sensor Tower account, and most commands need no login at all.

Anti-triggers

Do not use this CLI for:

• Do not use this CLI for precise revenue or download numbers; upstream returns 1-significant-figure buckets and app owners report they can be off by more than half
• Do not use this CLI for Sensor Tower's paid API (api.sensortower.com) — it targets the free dashboard surface and cannot mint or use an enterprise auth_token
• Do not use this CLI for Ad Intelligence, Pathmatics ad creatives, Usage Intelligence, or web analytics; those are entitled products that return 401 on the free surface
• Do not use this CLI for keyword rank tracking or ASO keyword research; those endpoints are not part of the reachable free surface
• Do not use this CLI for high-volume bulk export; the upstream rate limit is roughly a dozen requests before a four-minute lockout

Unique Capabilities

These capabilities aren't available in any other tool for this API.

History the dashboard never kept

• movers — See which apps climbed, fell, or newly appeared in a category chart since the previous 'movers' run.

  Reach for this when the question is 'who is new or moving in this category', which the dashboard cannot answer because it keeps no history.

  sensortower-pp-cli movers 6015 --country US --agent

• teardown — Align an app's release timeline against its rank history to see which shipped version moved the needle.

  Reach for this when a competitor spikes and you need to know whether a release, not luck, explains it.

  sensortower-pp-cli teardown 460177396 --agent

• watch digest — Print every tracked app's current rank per chart plus its delta since the previous 'movers' run.

  Reach for this for the recurring Monday check across a whole tracked set, instead of re-reading ranks app by app.

  sensortower-pp-cli watch digest --agent

Exact ranks over fuzzy money

• divergence — Find monetization outliers in a category by comparing each app's free-chart rank against its grossing-chart rank.

  Reach for this to spot install-rich but monetization-poor apps (or the inverse) without trusting Sensor Tower's coarse revenue estimates.

  sensortower-pp-cli divergence 6015 --country US --agent

Cross-platform

• compare — Compare one product's iOS and Android standing side by side after resolving cross-platform identity.

  Reach for this when asked which platform is winning for the same app; requires a session cookie via auth login --chrome.

  sensortower-pp-cli compare 460177396 tv.twitch.android.app --agent

Command Reference

apps — Look up app metadata by store ID across iOS, Android, and unified IDs

• sensortower-pp-cli apps android — Look up one or more Android apps by package name
• sensortower-pp-cli apps get — Full iOS app profile: exact category ranks, 400+ version history entries, in-app purchases, rating breakdown
• sensortower-pp-cli apps ios — Look up several iOS apps at once by numeric App Store ID (leaner than 'apps get'; accepts multiple IDs)
• sensortower-pp-cli apps unified — Resolve an app to its unified cross-platform record, joining iOS and Android identities

categories — Reference data for category IDs and slugs

• sensortower-pp-cli categories — Every valid iOS category ID and Android category slug, as published by Sensor Tower

category — An app's rank history and per-category ranking summary

• sensortower-pp-cli category history — Daily rank history for apps across chart types and countries over a date range
• sensortower-pp-cli category summary — Which categories and chart types an app currently ranks in

find — Find apps and publishers by name in the live store catalog

• sensortower-pp-cli find <term> — Search the store catalog by name; returns matching apps or publishers with download and revenue signals

publishers — Publisher portfolios and unified publisher identity

• sensortower-pp-cli publishers apps — Every iOS app in a publisher's portfolio
• sensortower-pp-cli publishers unified — Resolve a publisher to its unified cross-platform record

rankings — Store top-chart rankings by category and country

• sensortower-pp-cli rankings android — Top Google Play charts for a category and country on a given date
• sensortower-pp-cli rankings ios — Top iOS charts (free/paid/grossing) for a category and country on a given date

Freshness Contract

This printed CLI owns bounded freshness only for registered store-backed read command paths. In --data-source auto mode, those paths check sync_state and may run a bounded refresh before reading local data. --data-source local never refreshes. --data-source live reads the API and does not mutate the local store. Set SENSORTOWER_NO_AUTO_REFRESH=1 to skip the freshness hook without changing source selection.

Covered paths:

• sensortower-pp-cli categories
• sensortower-pp-cli categories get
• sensortower-pp-cli categories list
• sensortower-pp-cli categories search

When JSON output uses the generated provenance envelope, freshness metadata appears at meta.freshness. Treat it as current-cache freshness for the covered command path, not a guarantee of complete historical backfill or API-specific enrichment.

Finding the right command

When you know what you want to do but not which command does it, ask the CLI directly:

sensortower-pp-cli which "<capability in your own words>"

which resolves a natural-language capability query to the best matching command from this CLI's curated feature index. Exit code 0 means at least one match; exit code 2 means no confident match — fall back to --help or use a narrower query.

Recipes

Find an app, then read its exact ranks

sensortower-pp-cli find spotify --os ios --agent --select app_id,name

Search returns 99 entities; narrowing with --select keeps an agent's context small before picking an ID.

Pull only the rank block from a 39KB profile

sensortower-pp-cli apps get 460177396 --agent --select name,category_rankings,worldwide_last_month_downloads

The app hub object has 51 top-level keys including a 400+ entry version array; --select avoids burning context on fields you did not ask for.

See which release moved the chart

sensortower-pp-cli teardown 460177396 --agent

Aligns the versions timeline against locally stored rank history so you can see whether a ship date precedes a climb.

Catch new entrants in a category

sensortower-pp-cli movers 6015 --country US --agent

Set-differences the latest chart snapshot against the previous one; requires two 'movers' runs on the same category to have a baseline.

Compare the same product across platforms

sensortower-pp-cli compare 460177396 tv.twitch.android.app --agent

Resolves cross-platform identity via the cookie-gated unified endpoint, then shows both rank ladders side by side.

Track apps, then digest them without spending requests

sensortower-pp-cli watch add 460177396 --os ios && sensortower-pp-cli watch digest --agent

'watch digest' makes zero API calls: it reports ranks from snapshots that 'movers' already stored, which matters against a ~12-request budget.

Auth Setup

Most of this CLI needs no credentials at all: app lookups, catalog search, top charts, rank history, and publisher portfolios all work anonymously. A Sensor Tower session cookie unlocks exactly one thing — the cross-platform unified endpoints behind 'apps unified', 'publishers unified', and 'compare'. Run 'auth login --chrome' to import that session from your browser. The upstream API is rate limited at roughly a dozen requests before returning 429 with about a four-minute recovery and no Retry-After header, so this CLI is cache-first by design: 'movers' and 'divergence' each cost exactly one request, 'movers' stores a chart snapshot locally as it goes, and 'watch digest' reads that stored history without calling the API at all.

Run sensortower-pp-cli doctor to verify setup.

Agent Mode

Add --agent to any command. Expands to: --json --compact --no-input --no-color --yes.

• Pipeable — JSON on stdout, errors on stderr

• Filterable — --select keeps a subset of fields. Dotted paths descend into nested structures; arrays traverse element-wise. Critical for keeping context small on verbose APIs:

  sensortower-pp-cli apps get mock-value --agent --select id,name,status

• Previewable — --dry-run shows the request without sending

• Offline-friendly — sync/search commands can use the local SQLite store when available

• Non-interactive — never prompts, every input is a flag

• Read-only — do not use this CLI for create, update, delete, publish, comment, upvote, invite, order, send, or other mutating requests

Response envelope

Commands that read from the local store or the API wrap output in a provenance envelope:

{
  "meta": {"source": "live" | "local", "synced_at": "...", "reason": "..."},
  "results": <data>
}

Parse .results for data and .meta.source to know whether it's live or local. A human-readable N results (live) summary is printed to stderr only when stdout is a terminal AND no machine-format flag (--json, --csv, --compact, --quiet, --plain, --select) is set — piped/agent consumers and explicit-format runs get pure JSON on stdout.

Paths and state

Agents should treat the CLI's path resolver as part of the runtime contract:

• Use --home <dir> for one invocation, or set SENSORTOWER_HOME=<dir> to relocate all four path kinds under one root.

• Use per-kind env vars only when a specific kind must diverge: SENSORTOWER_CONFIG_DIR, SENSORTOWER_DATA_DIR, SENSORTOWER_STATE_DIR, SENSORTOWER_CACHE_DIR.

• Resolution order is per-kind env var, --home, SENSORTOWER_HOME, XDG (XDG_CONFIG_HOME, XDG_DATA_HOME, XDG_STATE_HOME, XDG_CACHE_HOME), then platform defaults.

• config contains settings like config.toml and profiles. data contains credentials.toml, data.db, cookies, and auth sidecars. state contains persisted queries, jobs, and teach.log. cache contains regenerable HTTP/cache files.

• Stored secrets live in credentials.toml under the data dir. Existing legacy config.toml secrets are read for compatibility and leave config.toml on the first auth write.

• Run sensortower-pp-cli doctor --fail-on warn to surface path and credential-location warnings. agent-context exposes a schema v4 paths block for agents that need the resolved dirs.

• For MCP, pass relocation through the MCP host config. The MCP binary does not inherit CLI flags:

  {
    "mcpServers": {
      "sensortower": {
        "command": "sensortower-pp-mcp",
        "env": {
          "SENSORTOWER_HOME": "/srv/sensortower"
        }
      }
    }
  }

Fleet precedence: an inherited per-kind env var overrides an explicit --home for that kind. Use SENSORTOWER_HOME or per-kind vars as durable fleet levers, and use --home only for a single invocation. Relocation is not reversible by unsetting env vars; move files manually before clearing SENSORTOWER_HOME, or doctor will not find credentials left under the former root.

Automatic learning

This CLI ships a self-capturing learning loop. The CLI does its own bookkeeping: every invocation is journaled locally, a failed flag followed by a corrected retry auto-derives a flag_alias candidate, and a teach on a query family without a playbook auto-synthesizes a playbook_candidate from the session's journal. Your job is judgment only: recall first, act on surfaced candidates, teach the final answer, playbook amend when you observe a correction. You never record failures by hand.

Step 1: recall before any discovery

Before list/search/drill commands on a new user question, run:

sensortower-pp-cli recall "<user's question>" --agent

The response envelope:

{
  "query": "...",
  "normalized": "<normalized form>",
  "query_entities": ["..."],
  "found": true | false,
  "match_score": 0.0,
  "results": [
    { "resource_id": "...", "resource_type": "...", "venue": "...",
      "confidence": 2, "entity_match": "exact|partial|unknown",
      "source": "taught|preseed|pattern", "warnings": ["..."] }
  ],
  "mismatches": [ /* only when --debug-mismatches */ ],
  "warnings": [ /* top-level */ ],
  "candidates": [
    { "id": 12, "class": "flag_alias | playbook_candidate",
      "summary": "...", "sightings": 3, "last_seen": "...",
      "rationale": "...",
      "next_action": ["<trial command>", "sensortower-pp-cli learnings confirm 12"] }
  ],
  "playbook": {
    "query_family": "...",
    "playbook": {
      "steps": [ { "cmd": "<command with {slot} substitution>", "purpose": "..." } ],
      "entity_slots": ["$ENTITY"],
      "expected_tool_calls": 3
    },
    "slots_resolved": { "$ENTITY": { "token": "<live token>", "canonical": "<canonical>" } },
    "notes": "<workarounds + gotchas for this query family>"
  },
  "notes": "<duplicate surface for non-playbook callers>"
}

Empty-store short-circuit: if the store has no learnings, playbooks, or candidates yet (recall finds nothing and learnings list and learnings candidates are both empty), skip recall for the rest of this session instead of taxing every query; resume recall-first once something has been taught.

Step 2: decision tree

Read candidates, playbook, notes, results[0], and warnings in that order:

if Candidates present (warnings include "candidates_present"):
    -> candidates are try-then-confirm, never facts. Follow each candidate's
       two-step next_action verbatim: run the trial command first, then run
       `learnings confirm <id>` only after the trial verified the behavior.
       Reject a wrong candidate with `learnings reject <id>`.
    -> NEVER re-teach something recall surfaced as a candidate; confirm or
       reject that candidate instead of teaching a duplicate.
    -> candidates ride alongside playbooks and resource hits, not instead of
       them; continue with the branches below after acting on them.

if Playbook present:
    -> READ Playbook.notes verbatim FIRST (workarounds + gotchas the CLI surface doesn't expose)
    -> replay Playbook.steps in order, substituting Playbook.slots_resolved entries
       for the entity slot tokens. If a step's slot is unresolved, fall back to
       discovery for that step only.
    -> the Playbook's expected_tool_calls is a budget; if you find yourself running
       materially more, record the divergence via `sensortower-pp-cli playbook amend`
       at end-of-session.

elif Notes present (no Playbook):
    -> read Notes verbatim before any discovery step; they carry known gotchas
       for this query family even when no structured choreography exists yet.

elif Found AND Results[0].EntityMatch == "exact" AND Results[0].Confidence >= 2:
    -> skip discovery; fetch live data for Results[*].ResourceID in parallel

elif Found AND Results[0].EntityMatch == "partial":
    -> candidate hint, NOT a hit; read the resource title to validate before trusting

elif (any row in Mismatches[] when --debug-mismatches was passed):
    -> treat as cold start; the stored learning is for a different entity
       (different canonical resolved from query_entities)

else:  // Found == false, no playbook, no notes
    -> cold start; run discovery normally; teach the answer afterward (Step 4).
       If the family has no playbook yet, that teach auto-synthesizes a
       playbook candidate from this session's journal - you do not need to
       record one by hand.

Playbook and Notes are orthogonal to the per-resource path. A recall response can carry both a Playbook AND a Results[] hit - use both: the Playbook tells you which choreography to run; the resource hits short-circuit specific steps. Default to skipping mismatches; pass --debug-mismatches only when investigating cold-start surprises.

Candidate judgment details: learnings confirm <id> prints the candidate's full payload before materializing it - check that the printed payload matches the behavior you verified. learnings reject <id> tombstones the derivation signature so the same candidate does not resurface. The envelope carries only the few candidates worth acting on now; sensortower-pp-cli learnings candidates lists the full open set.

Graceful degradation: if learnings confirm is an unknown command, you are driving an older binary - ignore the candidates guidance and follow the rest of the protocol.