What actually ages out
Apple’s App Store Connect Analytics Reports API lets you create an ONGOING report request, which keeps generating a new report instance on a recurring schedule. The catch: the list of instances you can actually fetch back through the API is capped to roughly the trailing two weeks. Once an instance ages past that window, it’s gone — the request itself keeps running, but you can no longer pull the older data through the API, at any price, with any key.
The nuance that trips people up
This limitation is specific to the API. If you log into appstoreconnect.apple.com yourself and look at the App Analytics tab, you can see longer historical trend charts rendered right there in the browser — Apple just doesn’t expose that same history through the programmatic API that developers use to build their own tools or automation. So “Apple forgets your data” is a bit of shorthand — more precisely, Apple’s API forgets it, even though a human looking at the dashboard can still see further back.
Why the distinction matters
If all you want is to eyeball a chart occasionally, the website’s longer view might be enough. But the moment you want to do anything else with your own numbers — export them, compare one quarter against another, hand a clean record to an accountant, or feed your growth data to an AI for analysis — the API is your only path in, and it only remembers about two weeks. Everything earlier than that is unrecoverable once it ages out, regardless of what the website still shows you visually.
What developers actually do about it
There are really two options: pull the reports yourself on a schedule and store them somewhere durable (a cron job plus a database, maintained indefinitely), or use a tool that already does exactly that. Either way, the fix is the same shape — capture the data before the two-week window closes, since there’s no way to go back and recover it afterward.
This is the entire reason Manifest exists: it pulls every tracked app’s reports once a day automatically and keeps them permanently, so your history is never racing a 14-day clock. Nothing here is estimated between pulls — every number is exactly what Apple reported, kept rather than let expire.