Nobody can sell you App Store search volume
Neither store publishes it. Every tool showing a volume number is showing you a model, and most will not tell you that it is one.
Apple exposes search volume only through the Search Ads API, to advertisers, for their own account. Google publishes nothing comparable for Play. So any ASO tool displaying "search volume: 18,400" is displaying an estimate.
That is not automatically wrong. What is wrong is presenting it in the same typeface as a measured rank, with no indication that one was observed and the other inferred.
What we show, and how it is labelled
A demand signal derived from competitive behaviour rather than from a volume estimate, and labelled a proxy everywhere it appears. It is comparable between terms and meaningless as an absolute number, which the interface states rather than hoping you infer.
The question it does not answer
It tells you which terms are contested. It does not tell you how many people searched anything, and it lags: a term that has just started converting will not show up until the market reacts. Both limits are stated in the product.
The one that does answer it
For deciding whether to bother with a term, "can an app my size rank here" beats any volume figure, and unlike volume it is answerable from what the store already shows. If an app with 317 ratings holds position 7, size is not what is keeping you out. That comparison sits beside every keyword.
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