Proven demand, terrible rivals.
Find your next app.
Softspot scans the App Store for leaders with heavy usage but low ratings. A category like that isn't full — it just means nobody has done it well yet. That's your opening.
No signup. Results in seconds.
Splitwise leads with 26,422 votes but only 3.9★. Better is possible — nobody built it.
Opportunity in three steps
Stop guessing ideas. See where the market cracks.
Type categories
Enter what people search in the App Store — the need itself, not app names.
Softspot scans
It measures each category leader's rating, vote count, and last update date.
Read the complaints
It mines the weak leader's 1–2 star reviews into concrete gaps — a product spec, ready to build.
A real crack
Here's what we found in the “split expenses” category.
Recurring complaints
From a review“You can only add 4 expenses per day and you have to watch a 10 second ad each time.”
The leader deliberately crippled its free tier. The market isn't locked — it's just poorly served.
Mobile app ideas: frequently asked
On finding ideas, validating them, and how Softspot works.
Give me a mobile app idea — where do I start?
A good mobile app idea is a need people already want but nobody serves well. Softspot finds this automatically: it scans the App Store for leaders with heavy usage (lots of votes) but low ratings. A category like that isn't full — it means something better can be built.
Is this app idea worth building — how do I know?
Check three signals: demand (is total votes/downloads in the category high), competition quality (is the leading app's rating low), and complaints (recurring concrete gaps in 1–2 star reviews). Proven demand + a weak leader + clear complaints means the idea likely has legs. Softspot measures all three together.
How do I validate an app idea without writing code?
Read competitors' 1–2 star reviews. Phrases like "I can't export", "it used to be free", or "they capped me at 4 entries a day" are a product spec. Softspot extracts these complaints automatically and ranks them by frequency, so you see the demand and the gap without writing a line of code.
Which App Store categories have opportunities?
Opportunity depends on the leader, not the category: any category with a popular but low-rated leader is a candidate. With Softspot you can scan the real top charts of categories like Finance, Productivity, Health, and Utilities and instantly see which ones have a weak leader.
What is Softspot and is it free?
Softspot is an App Store opportunity scanner: it finds categories with proven demand but weak competition and turns competitor complaints into a product idea. Scanning is free and requires no signup; a detailed Excel report is emailed to you.
How do I find competitor app complaints?
Softspot scans the weak leader's 1–2 star App Store reviews, extracts recurring phrases ranked by frequency, and shows sample reviews. That tells you exactly what users find missing — and therefore what you should build.
Run your own scan
Type a few categories, pick a sensitivity, go.
One per line. Write what people would type into App Store search, not an app name.
Write the terms in the language of the United States storefront — otherwise results come back empty or irrelevant.
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No search yet
Add a few categories above and start the search.