What is app-store-research?

A research tool for Apple’s App Store, the marketplace where people find and download iPhone, iPad, and other Apple-platform apps.

For finding apps, reviewing metadata, prices, ratings, reviews, privacy details, releases, developers, charts, and comparisons for App Store optimisation (ASO).

It helps you investigate changing public store data without manually checking many app pages. The results can vary by country and over time, so the tool records the chosen store location and reports missing data.

app-store-research — Skill for Codex by plahteenlahti

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent

npx skills add plahteenlahti/app-store-mcp --skill app-store-research

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/plahteenlahti/app-store-mcp

Made for: Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/plahteenlahti/app-store-mcp/app-store-research/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/plahteenlahti/app-store-mcp/app-store-research)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/plahteenlahti/app-store-mcp/app-store-research"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/plahteenlahti/app-store-mcp/app-store-research/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/plahteenlahti/app-store-mcp/app-store-research"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/plahteenlahti/app-store-mcp/app-store-research.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 49 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 578 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.

Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.

Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00049	$0.00578
Opus 5	$0.00024	$0.00289
Sonnet 5	$0.00010	$0.00116
Haiku 4.5	$0.00005	$0.00058

Measured 12d ago against content hash f3f88ebeddbe, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

app-store-research scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 12d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/app-store-research/SKILL.md · 33 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 33 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

App Store Research

Use the app_store_* MCP tools. Treat results as live public App Store data that can vary by country and change over time.

Narrowest path

Fix the store country. Omit country when US results are acceptable; otherwise use one country consistently. This is complete when every country-sensitive call has an explicit or shared store.
Resolve each app once. Reuse a known numeric id or bundle appId instead of searching again. This is complete when every target has an identifier or a confirmed no-result.
Select the narrowest calls and smallest useful result sets. This is complete when every call supplies evidence required by the request.
Report only relevant fields. State the country for rankings, prices, ratings, and reviews; report errors or missing data without filling gaps. This is complete when facts from tools are distinguishable from conclusions.

Choose tools

Discover apps: call app_store_search. Prefer idsOnly: true when only an ID is needed. Start with num: 5 or fewer.
Inspect one app: call app_store_app with id or appId. Set ratings: true when metadata and the rating histogram are both needed; avoid a separate ratings call.
Read ratings only: call app_store_ratings with numeric id.
Read reviews: call app_store_reviews. Start at page 1; request more pages only when the user needs a larger sample. Use mostRecent or mostHelpful explicitly when order matters.
Inspect privacy or releases: call app_store_privacy or app_store_version_history with numeric id.
Inspect monetization: call app_store_in_app_purchases with numeric id. Treat prices as localized display strings; Apple does not expose product identifiers or numeric amounts here.
Find related apps: call app_store_similar with id or appId.
Inspect a publisher: call app_store_developer with numeric devId from app metadata.
Read charts: call app_store_list. Keep num small and set fullDetail: false unless every result needs full metadata.
Complete a partial query: call app_store_suggest only when suggestions themselves help answer the request.

Read the full file on GitHub · 33 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

agents/openai.yaml 203 B

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

12d ago First seen · 33 lines · 49 tokens per session scan A f3f88ebeddbe

Subscribe to this mod's changes

app-store-research is a skill published in the GitHub repository plahteenlahti/app-store-mcp (1 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 49 tokens to every session and 578 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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