Analysing the wider trends of the mobile explosion is something ad companies such as AdMob, Flurry and Smaato are keen to tell us all about.

When it comes to providing information about how your games and apps are performing however, that's a more precise and delicate operation.

Recent US start-up appFigures reckons it has the technology to help developers.

It says its reporting platform for iPhone developers brings together App Store sales data, worldwide reviews, and hourly rank updates into a single source of information.

We caught up with co-founder Ariel Michael, who's involved with games developer Spiralstorm, which alongside appFigures is owned by New York media company Fileitup Media, to find out more.

Pocket Gamer: Why did you start appFigures?

Ariel Michael: We released our first iPhone game back in the winter of 2008 and working with Excel every day got really tiring really fast. AppFigures started as an internal reporting tool for our own use, but after seeing how convenient it was we decided to make it public.

Why do you think other developers would be interested in it?

The reports Apple publishes every morning are raw and really hard to interpret. To make matters even harder on developers, these reports are not delivered to them but rather get published to the iTunes Connect portal every day, where they are deleted after seven days.

AppFigures simplifies this entire process by automatically importing these reports directly from Apple, converting them into meaningful charts and data tables and then sends a summary report by email.

What other features does it offer?

We go beyond sales reports to bring in other App Store data to make sales reports more understandable. For example, we go through all App Stores worldwide and track reviews and ranks for all apps.

Without appFigures, a developer who wants to read reviews for his app from countries other than his own would need to manually change the location in his iTunes program, search for his app, and then read reviews. With appFigures, all the developer needs to do is click the All Countries button. We add even more convenience by automatically translating reviews to the language of the user.

AppFigures also tracks app ranks from all App Stores, hourly. We save those results, show trends, and even overlay ranks with sales to give developers a better understanding of the distribution of their apps.

Can you extend it to other platforms?

We're planning to extend appFigures to Android Market and enable developers who have apps in multiple stores to view data from all of them in a single place.

How do you think this data can help game developers maximise their sales?

Understanding how the App Store works is something every developer can use to make sounder decisions.

And we're working towards being able to predict future trends from current data.

We're also working with our members to incorporate sales data (aggregated anonymously from members who opt in). Combined with ranks data, we want to make the task of pricing an app a more educated decision than a complete guess.

Thanks to Ariel for his time.

You can find out more about appFigures here.

It's available on a 14-day free trial, and is either free for the basic option, or from either $4.99 or from $139 per month depending on your requirements.