probr for iPhone is out. Android is next.
The competitor tracking app is on the App Store: the feed, the weekly brief, and a Home Screen widget that shows what moved before you open anything. Android is close behind.
By The probr team
probr is on the App Store. It is the same product the web app has always been — a short list of competitors, read twice a day, with everything that changed nothing thrown away — except the part you check in the morning now lives on the thing you already reach for in the morning.
What is on the phone
Everything that matters, and not much else.
The feed is the app. Every signal probr kept, newest first, filed under the day it found them, with the severity in the gutter so a critical one is visible before you read a word. Tap a competitor's name and you get the same dossier the web app shows.
The weekly brief arrives on Monday morning as a written page rather than a list of links, and now as a push notification rather than only an email you might not open until Thursday.
The dossier carries what probr worked out about each company — what they sell, the channels it is watching, and where your own site ranks beside theirs on Market Presence. That last one is the reason the app is not just a reader: it is the only screen that is about you rather than about them.
And a widget, which is the part worth putting on your Home Screen. It shows the day's tally and the newest signal under it, so on most days you learn what happened without opening anything at all. There is a Lock Screen version too, for the glance you give your phone before you have properly woken up.
What the app deliberately does not do
There are no prices in it, no plans, and nothing asking you to upgrade. Your plan is chosen on the web and the phone simply reflects it. That is partly Apple's rule for a companion app to a paid tool, and partly the same instinct the rest of probr is built on: the app is for reading what your competitors did, and a screen that interrupts that to sell you something is a screen doing two jobs badly.
It also does not analyse anything locally. The reading, the classification and the writing all happen on probr's servers on their own schedule, twice a day. The app is a window onto work that has already been done, which is why it opens as fast as it does.
When it cannot reach us
One small thing we are quietly pleased with. If your phone loses its connection, the app does not sign you out. It says it cannot reach probr, shows you what it last read and when, and offers to try again.
That sounds obvious and it was not what the app did first. Not being able to check a session is not the same as not having one, and collapsing the two meant a train tunnel logged people out of a product they were paying for. Treating "I don't know" as its own answer, rather than rounding it down to "no", fixed a whole class of these.
Android
Android is next, and it is not a rewrite. probr is one codebase across both, the Android widget is already built, and the store listing is prepared. We would rather ship it when it is right than name a date and shave the corners to hit it — but the gap will be weeks, not months.
If you want to know the day it lands, the weekly brief is where we will say so.
Getting started
If you already have a workspace, sign in on the phone with the account you use on the web and everything is there. If you do not, the quickstart is about three minutes: name your workspace, add the competitors you actually care about, and probr starts reading tonight.
Two suggestions from watching people use it. Add the widget on the first day rather than the second — it is what turns probr from a site you remember to visit into something you simply know. And keep the list short. probr is built for the five or ten companies whose moves would change what you do this quarter, and a list of forty is a list nobody reads.
Requires iOS 16.4 or later; the Home Screen and Lock Screen widgets need iOS 17. Free to install — your workspace and plan are set up on the web.