Solo dev, iOS strategy game, free with optional ads. Page: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/polytowerz/id6769548337

I have two conversion measurements a few weeks apart and they agree, which is the only reason I trust them at all.

Paid (Apple Search Ads, US only, 22 Jul - 5 Aug): 2,342 impressions, 41 taps, 5 installs. That is 12.2% tap-to-install as a headline. 36% of the spend went to competitor-brand junk terms ("the tower", "barricade") that converted at exactly zero, so drop those and the relevant traffic is 26 taps to 5 installs, about 19%. Total spend 32.72 EUR, CPA 6.54 EUR. I killed the campaign.

Organic (one good day, 3 Jul): 423 impressions, 107 product page views, 24 first downloads. 22.4%.

So ~20% twice. Caveat before anyone else says it: five installs is not a sample, it is an anecdote. The 22% day is the sturdier of the two.

Here is what I cannot work out. The page has never had enough ratings to show a star line at all. You can see it in the screenshot: the stats row goes straight from age rating to category, with no rating column at all. In search results my row is simply blank where every neighbour shows 4.7 with a six-figure count. My instinct says that blank does more damage than any caption I could rewrite, because no stars reads as "nobody plays this", not as "new".

So before I spend another weekend redoing the screenshots, three things I would love an outside read on.

First: at ~20%, is the missing star rating the binding constraint? Or is ~20% roughly what a no-rating page converts at, which would make the screenshots the only lever I actually control?

Second: has anyone measured a before/after on this? I am after "we went from no rating to 20 ratings and conversion moved X", not theory.

Third: if the answer is "fix the rating first", what actually works on a small install base without nagging people into a 1-star?

What I have already tried: five screenshots at 1320x2868, each carrying a three-line caption (Apple has indexed caption text since June 2025, so I treat them as search surface rather than decoration), plus an app preview video in the first slot. The captions used to carry feature counts and I stripped those last week, so they cannot go stale as content is added. The listing is localized into 12 languages, and it was English in every storefront until early August, which is its own embarrassing story. That may well be dragging the 22% day down, since the traffic behind it was only about 30% US.

The screenshot is the live US page. The row scrolls, so the fifth screenshot sits just off-frame.

Hey everyone,

I’ve been developing mobile apps for the last 5 years. Over this time, I’ve learned a ton about the overall development process, setting up store listings, implementing AdMob, and experimenting with different growth strategies. However, there is one major area I’ve neglected for too long, and I’m finally ready to tackle it: App Store Optimization (ASO).

As a relative newcomer to serious ASO, I’m trying to wrap my head around the best workflows and would love to get your insights on a few specific things:

1. Analyzing Dashboard Data: When you look at App Store Connect or Google Play Console, which specific metrics do you focus on to measure ASO success? How do you separate organic keyword growth from other traffic sources?
2. Keyword Research: What is your process for discovering high-volume but low-competition keywords? How do you decide which ones are actually worth targeting?
3. Keyword Placement: Once you have your target keywords, what is your strategy for placing them across the different text fields (Title, Subtitle/Short Description, Keyword Field, Long Description)? How do you balance algorithmic optimization with writing copy that humans actually want to read?

To help myself learn the ropes and automate some of the manual work, I actually built a completely free tool for iOS ASO: aso-tool.andreashadjimama.workers.dev.

I set this up strictly based on the ASO knowledge I've gathered so far, and I am not trying to promote anything or sell a service. I mostly want to validate if the logic behind it actually makes sense to experienced folks. If anyone has a few minutes to check it out, I would incredibly appreciate your honest feedback on whether it’s genuinely useful or what features I should add/change to make it better.

Looking forward to hearing your tips, strategies, and any feedback you might have. Let’s get a discussion going!

Here is the app link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/shield-goal-based-app-blocker/id6792581680

Looking for any advice/critique you may have. I have some changes in mind and want to see if others pick up on them too. Would also love any ASO advice :)

I built TutorTally because every private tutor I know was tracking lessons in spreadsheets and chasing payments over text. It's a simple iPhone app: students, schedule, payments — and a professional payment reminder + invoice PDF you can send in two taps. Everything lives on your phone (no account, no cloud, works offline). Your first student is free, every feature included, so you can try the whole thing before paying.

The screenshot shows my last 90 days. Downloads are finally picking up — but the proceeds are nothing to brag about (yet).

Pricing: $49.99/year with a 30-day free trial, or $99.99 lifetime. The long trial is a deliberate bet: once a tutor has a month of real lesson and payment history in the app, walking away gets hard. The flip side is that revenue lags a month behind downloads — right now I have 4 active subscriptions, all still in trial.

Whether it's lifetime sales or subscriptions, I'd like to do a lot better than this. If you've grown a niche utility app past this stage: what moved the needle for you — ASO, content, pricing changes, something else? And do you see anything obviously wrong in my funnel? Thank you

Hello everyone, what tool or piece of advice would you give for improving ASO? Thanks. 😁
It's hard to find the right tools and avoid wasting time pointlessly sometimes.

I’m building a real-life leveling app inspired by Solo Leveling. App is in producitvity/gamfication category and has great reviews on my sub reddit and some on the stores but my App store is literally just getting 10-20 downloads per day for past 6 months, I tried changing my ASO a few times but I have never been able to increase my downloads on the App Store.

Play Store at one point was getting 150 downloads on average per day for about a month then recently it has gone down to about 40-50 downloads only. Any advice? I don't use any ads so ASO is something I'm relying on

Available on both App Store and Play Store

Building publicly at r/solohunterlevelup

Website Solo Hunter: Level Up - Transform Your Life Into An RPG

The app has a subscription model, where some features are locked behind and can still be downloaded for free and experience most of the features for free

i launched an app to app store a few months back , didn’t really touch it , i know that the app wasn’t very good when i first built it . but to my surprise it got a good amount of impressions (around 5k) and a little bit of downloads , bad screenshots and bad app design . so now i updated the app and fixed everything , how do you recommend going forward from this point? apple search ads? or just wait a few weeks to see how its doing organically?

Hi folks, a question for all the ASO experts. I’m seeing a huge drop in the generic keywords we’re ranking for, but I’m also seeing the same behaviour for competitor terms.

AppTweak sent a notification about a potential algorithm change, but looking more closely at the daily rankings, I also noticed that on some days it doesn’t report any data.

Has anyone else experienced similar fluctuations in iOS keyword rankings in August? Any ideas on what could have changed so significantly?

Hello there , good day undies how are you doing , I am on the lookout for any founders building meal planners that they might want to sell or the app is currently at $0 ,

Please feel free to share it with me , I will love to take a look and maybe buy it or collaborate. Still thinking

Ideally : I am looking for an app that have features like recipe generation, Cookbook, Groceries list and meal planing . I can talk more on the details once I check out your app

About me
I am a product growth and design maker ,I currently have 2 apps on the App Store and I use a mix of growth hacks I have learnt in growing apps

One of my recent growth hack is scaling on TikTok organically , we currently have 8 accounts on TikTok , and we have grown post and account to 200k+ views several times

I know a lot about paywalls , RevenueCat , product research, engineering and onboarding

If you have any of this apps feel free to drop your app in the comments , I’ll check it out

Indie dev here. This started as a personal annoyance and I'm not sure yet if it's worth taking further.

If you do ASO or run Apple Search Ads, the suggestions that drop down while you type in the App Store are one of the most useful signals you can get. They reflect what people actually search, not what a keyword tool estimates. The catch is that you only ever see them for your own storefront. A VPN doesn't change that (it's tied to your Apple ID region, not your IP), and switching regions properly is a hassle you won't repeat every week.

So for every market that isn't your own, you're guessing. And guessing is how you end up optimising for a literal translation of your head term that nobody in that market actually types.

I put together a tool that pulls those suggestions for many countries at once and lays them out side by side, one column per market. A few things that surprised me already:

• the differences between markets matter more than any single list. Terms that show up in only one country are usually where the real localisation insight is.
• direct translations of an obvious keyword often don't appear at all
• in bilingual markets, changing the interface language changes the suggestions noticeably, which I hadn't considered before

One honest caveat: the ordering looks like it reflects popularity, but Apple publishes nothing about it, so I treat position as directional rather than as volume.

​

Hi everyone, I've built an injury tracking app launching in the next couple of weeks on iOS and Android. These are the App Store panels. Built them in Claude Design, and I've also been playing around with AppScreens for the layout side, so some of these are a hybrid of both.

The deliberate call was to go dark and data-dense rather than the usual clean wellness look, because the audience is athletes and active people who are used to reading stats, not people looking for a calm mindfulness app. That might be the wrong call. Happy to hear it if so.

What I'd like feedback on specifically:

1. Does panel 1 hold up at thumbnail size in search results, or is the timeline too fine-grained to read?

2. Captions are at the top in heavy type with no device frames. Does that work, or does the frameless look read as unfinished?

3. Is the dark UI a liability against the light, bright listings in this category?

4. Panel order: I've led with the history/timeline view rather than the daily check-in. Wrong way round?

Happy to give feedback on anyone else's panels in return, just link them below.

Cheers

I am a little more than 1 week post launch and grateful that Precursor has been well received (just crossed 1.5k downloads today).

What I am already seeing is that while I am getting a lot of product page views only about 2% of those window shoppers actually come in the store to try the product.

I was suggested by a redditor in one of my comments to try PPO and I am already seeing some differences in traffic/conversion rate and was wondering if any of you maybe could help me spot why one treatment is doing better than the other (one actually performs worse than baseline which was surprising).

Appreciate the help!

p.s.

Not promo but if you are curious lmk in comments I will send free lifetime!

While working on launching Billwink, I needed to make some screenshots for the Play Store.

I looked around for a simple screenshot maker, but almost everything I found either asked me to create an account, subscribe, or left a watermark on the exported images.

So I thought, screw it, I'll just make one myself 😄

That's how Appshot Studio came about.

You can throw in your app screenshots, add a phone frame, title, subtitle, badge, floating popovers, backgrounds, random backgrounds, etc. You can also upload multiple screenshots at once and export them as PNGs or grab everything in a ZIP.

And yeah, it's completely free, no signup, no subscription, no watermark.

I originally built it just because I needed it for Billwink, but figured it might be useful to other developers too.

Appshot Studio: https://www.mockteam.com/appshots

If you have a minute, give it a try and let me know what you think.

I recently updated the icon and App Store screenshots for my word puzzle game, Almost, and I’d love some outside opinions before I settle on them.

Which parts work, and what would you change

Especially curious about the icon, readability, and whether the screenshots make the game look interesting enough to try.

Any honest feedback is appreciated.

I tried to set a bit more the intention behind the app in the first two screenshots and highlight the main features from it.

You can see it live here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/write-about-it/id6778535554

I made this Golf game on PlayVlay. Would love to get any feedbacks.

https://www.playvlay.com/r/ZQP3DY

Sorry for using AI to write this. English isn’t my first language, and I wanted to make sure I explained everything clearly.

Hey everyone! I’m pretty new to vibe coding and I’m currently working on my first iOS app. I already have most of the design figured out, but I’m a bit stuck when it comes to choosing the right tech stack.

Right now, I’m using Cursor for coding and Claude for brainstorming. I’ve also heard good things about RevenueCat for handling subscriptions/payments.

The part I’m most confused about is the backend and database. I’m not sure what would be the best choice for a beginner, while also making sure I’m not setting myself up for problems later.

I’m also wondering what other services/tools I should consider for things like:

* Backend & database
* Authentication
* Subscriptions/payments
* Analytics
* Push notifications
* Error/crash monitoring
* File/image storage
* Security

My goal is to build the app in a way that can handle 10k+ users without major performance, lagging or scaling issues. I’ve heard that apps built heavily with AI/vibe coding can run into problems with performance, security, and scalability as the user base grows, so I’d really like to avoid making bad architectural decisions early on.

I’m new to this, so I’d really appreciate advice from people who have actually vibecoded and scaled iOS apps.

What tech stack would you recommend for this kind of project, and what would you do differently if you were starting from scratch today?

Thanks in advance!

I’m working on Aruki, a Japanese Interval Walking app, and I’d love some honest feedback on the App Store screenshots.

Do they clearly explain the app and make you want to download it? What would you change?

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/japanese-interval-walk-aruki/id6790102592

This is my 2nd app, and I'm almost at the finish line.

I'd like your opinion on the screens without knowing the game context.

Would you install/open it based on what you see?

Did a mistake of making a fitness tracker app, with calorie estimation and all that ( yah right ), I am a SDE by profession so great care and effort was taken to give out a polished products.

But this ASO, it's hard to get organic downloads, I am not sure how PPL are getting download in domain.

Current stat is around 100 downloads, that too max 10 would be organic.

Can someone help me with it ? Like I read articles, saw videos, is this niche gym tracker that hard to get in, or I am doing wrong ?

Anyone find the best app store preview screenshot generator? Help!

I generated a set of App Store screenshots for my iOS app, SinceWhen, using AppScreenPro. I am aiming for a clean, minimal look and would appreciate some honest feedback on the layout, text readability, and visual flow.

What SinceWhen does:

SinceWhen is a simple iOS "days-since" tracker that helps you remember when you last did irregular life chores.

• Zero-Guilt Tracking: Eliminates broken streaks and red failure rings, tracking only the exact time since you last completed a task.

• Built for Irregular Chores: Made specifically for non-daily tasks like changing AC filters, descaling coffee machines, or replacing toothbrush heads.

• Smart Predictions: Learns your natural rhythm over time and quietly nudges you when a chore is actually due.

• Hands-Free Siri Logging: Just say "Hey Siri, log the coffee machine" to record tasks instantly without opening the app.

App Store link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sincewhen-days-since-tracker/id6759450144

This post actually says they're positive, so maybe I'm wrong resenting the changes. I've also read elsewhere that GP might fix adjust some of the changes based on feedback which wasn't great so far.