How to Never Pay Full Price for an IPhone App Again
Most apps on the Apple App Store are phasing out asking you to pay up front, preferring to earn money through ads or in-app purchases. But if you’re someone who prefers to buy an app rather than dealing with microtransactions, price tracking can be a problem, especially after Apple retired the wishlist feature a few years ago. If you’re waiting for a good deal to finally buy a certain app, you need a dedicated price tracking service to help you, and you have some good options.
AppRaven
AppRaven helps you keep track of updates and discounts on the apps you love. It’s free to use and will help you know when the app you’re watching goes on sale. The app is easy to navigate, and once you create a free account, you can add as many apps as you like to your watchlist. AppRaven’s community features include the ability to create your own collections of apps and a forum for posting sales or discussing your favorite apps.
User-created app collections are great for discovering hidden gems or easy tracking of bulk sales, including discounts on in-app purchases. But even this app has felt the pull of microtransactions: while AppRaven can track price changes for free, you’ll have to pay $2 a month to get price drop alerts.
AppSliced
For a completely free source for tracking app and game deals in the App Store, try AppSliced . This service doesn’t have its own app, so you’ll have to use a website to track prices.
After creating an account, you can sign up for email notifications of price drops. AppSliced also provides free email alerts for in-app purchase sales, which is a nice feature (just make sure they don’t end up in your spam folder).
The AppHookup subreddit has a very active community that makes it easy to track app sales, including in-app purchases. Subscribe to this community to receive alerts through the Reddit app or an alternative Reddit app like Apollo.
On Reddit, you’re not likely to find deal notifications for every app you follow, but you’ll find discussion of both popular and obscure app deals. The community also posts about non-Apple apps, but most of its posts are about iOS apps.
Make your own wish list with the Shortcuts app.
If you’d rather create your own wish list on the App Store, you can use the Apple Shortcuts app to do so. Reddit user /u/refreshingbleach created two of these shortcuts, each serving a different purpose for app tracking:
Add app to wish list . After downloading this shortcut, you can open the App Store, find the app you want, and click the Share button. Select the “Add App to Wishlist” shortcut and it will add the app to Reminders. Now when you open Reminders you will see the name of the app and its price WHEN it was added to the list. (You will also need the following label to see the current price.)
Update your wishlist in the App Store . Run this shortcut whenever you want to check the latest prices for all the apps you have added to your wishlist. The list in Reminders will be updated with the current rates.