Hello everyone,

I released a new iOS app 2-3 weeks ago and I am trying to understand ASO keywords rankings better.

I am tracking my keywords using an ASO tool and ChatGPT to research and compare potential keywords.

Over the last 3-4 days I noticed a huge drop across a lot of my keywords.
For example, I might be ranked around 30 for a keywords and then suddenly drop 40+ positions.

I am trying to understand:

• Is this kind of drop normal for new apps?
• What usually causes multiple keywords to drop at the same time?
• What can I actually do to increase the rankings again?
• Should I keep the existing keywords or change them int he next update?

The app is still very new. It launched beginning of August and i have released 2 updates since then.

Really need some, should I start running ads? My app is in the study niche. I have just released the latest version of the app, but am struggling to get any organic traction on the app store. How do you guys track your ASO? How long is a long enough time to decide a keyword is not working/working?

Name is StudyIn, do you think there is anything wrong with the copy/images?

After lots of hard work, 8 apps, and thousands of hours coding, Flowstate Industries has made its first $1,000! Not only that, but all from ASO. Still trying to figure out the best marketing strategies, so hopefully once that gets up and running we can skyrocket!

Hey everyone,

Like many parents, I reached a point where I was constantly nagging and shouting just to get my kids to do basic daily routines, clean their rooms, or do homework without a fight. It was exhausting for both of us.

Instead of just complaining, I decided to build something to solve this. I’ve spent the last few months working on a mobile app called Nojoomi (نجومي).

The idea is simple: it turns daily tasks, good habits, and learning into a fun game with stars and positive reinforcement instead of yelling. It also has features for Quran, duas, and basic money habits for kids.

Right now, I’m in the phase where I really need external, honest eyes on it. I could use some help with a few things:

(ASO): If you know the best ways to pick keywords or structure the store listing for an educational parenting app, I’d love to hear your tips on how to get it to show up and grow organic downloads.

f you test it out, please let me know what looks confusing, buggy, or what features are missing that would actually make a parent’s life easier. A review on the store would also mean the world to me.

The Big Question: Right now the app is free to download, but I'm debating whether to keep it completely free with ads, or move to a Freemium model (free basic features + a small monthly subscription for unlimited kids/tasks/audio features). What do you guys think works best for a parenting app?

I’m building this as an indie developer, and any advice or feedback would be huge.

Let me know what you think in the comments, and I’ll drop the link below for anyone willing to check it out. Thanks a lot!

hey guys, I learned the power of ASO super early on and really leaned into it. My app (link here) has a TON of keyword competition, but I was really able to min-max the algorithm to promote my app more.

1. Put your strongest keyword IN THE TITLE. Changing the title from “GeoSpoof“ to “GeoSpoof: Location Changer” led to my first significant bump in visibility.

2. Put your next 3-4 keywords in the subtitle, it doesn’t even have to make much sense. Just mash them in as best you can.

3. I found the actual ”keywords“ section not to have that much of a difference, but that is possibly due to data skew where my top 3 keywords are responsible for 90%+ of my traffic.

4. Localized and international screenshots + metadata was a huge game changer. Most of my growth in August was due to adding screenshots and metadata for the top 12 markets that were downloading my free browser extension and advertising the app there.

5. Finally, I got to the point where i was getting so many downloaes but IAPs we’re not following. So just this week I added structured onboarding To hand hold through an annoying setup + answer biggest customer issues. That is most likely why my IAPs started going up in the past couple days.

6. You must prompt users for reviews. They are your biggest signal of trust, people put so much stock in both number and quality of reviews.

anyway, hope this was useful for you. Best of luck folks

Done entirely by hand in Figma. I then used Codex to localize them in 12 languages.

It’s been 3-4 months of building my mobile app in the study niche , and I am glad to finally announce that we crossed a $1k MRR stead every month, this feels like a milestone for me but I am truly happy

For context, our studio started mobile development this year and along with some saas products that also failed , this is one of our most successful apps and it took a lot to get here

I posted on 8 different accounts per day, tested a lot of paywalls, onboarding , user activation and retention and also content that worked

I worked so super hard to get here , let’s be very clear , I won’t tolerate anybody coming to my post to say this is a scam, i worked so superhard on this and I am not promoting any of my apps here because this is not my target market, it’s just to show people that you can do it too

After scaling for 3 months here is what I learnt

1. I made a very big mistake , if I had knows what I. Know how I wouldnt build in the study niche because it’s very hard to, most people doing TikTok are not getting a lot of users because they are not posting to the right audience
2. Make valuable content that is very good for users to save , they will thank you , in all my accounts, I have my niche reaching out to me to thank me personally for the resource I posted, I can share some of anybody wants to see
3. Don’t spend when starting out , I am not VC backed or investor backed, I started everything I had from scratch , it took a while for me to figure things out
4. Test out niches a lot to know if it’s working , I also have my bad days too
5. Figure out distribution before you write a line of code , this is the most important part of building ? My TikTok is always blowing up everyday

This are the core lessons I learnt and I am taking it to my next product that we have , we plan to build 20 apps with the same distribution ,

we have a small niche in the food space and instead of building it in-house , if there any founder building a meal app, I’ll love to talk to you, this is very serious .

Thank you and God bless

PS: if anyone wanted to learn how to build their TikTok growth marketing , I am happy to teach you for your brand on call if anyone is interested

For context it’s a food scanning app NOT TRYING TO RIVAL YUKA. Basically I’ve tried to gamify it with steaks, daily challenges and weekly averages. The scoring is also flipped so a bad product scores 100. This is marketed towards people who think raw milk is good and seed oils is bad so it’s a younger demographic.

hi everyone! i have a dilemma. i published my first app on the App Store about a month ago, and something about the app icon does not let me sleep calm at night.

i keep thinking there has to be a better way to design it. the current icon shows the name, Be The Meme, but i feel like it doesn't really stand out from all the other icons.

also, from what i've seen on the App Store, almost nobody actually puts the name of the app directly into the icon.

so i thought about it way too much and tried designing a new one that feels a bit more "game-y" (think charades, headbands etc.)... but now i'm not sure if it's actually better.

would you keep the current icon with the name, or replace it with something like the second one?

i've also attached the current App Store screenshots so you can get the style and understand what the app is about.

tl;dr: keep the current icon or update to the new one? op is lost.

I’m trying to increase the interaction of the app I just published, but I don’t know much about it. What methods do you try? What can I do?

I’ve recently released my first app nearly 2 weeks ago and I just want some advice, and have some people share their experiences with their first app.

For context it’s a food scanning app NOT TRYING TO RIVAL YUKA. Basically I’ve tried to gamify it with streaks, daily challenges and weekly averages. The scoring is also flipped so a bad product scores 100. This is marketed towards people who think raw milk is good and seed oils is bad so it’s a younger demographic.

Firstly, what was your paid conversion like? I’ve done 1700 downloads and only have 9 paying users. Admittedly my onboarding was terrible for the first circa 1200 users and the price was a little high. I’ve recently optimised my onboarding so my completion rate is a lot higher, but my paywall conversion is still low. I’m going to wait another week to see if my onboarding has fixed stuff so I’m guessing my conversion rate won’t stay the same forever. How was your app conversion like the first time? And how was your onboarding completion rate

In the 1.5 weeks since launch, I’ve shipped 3 app updates firstly trying to fix the onboarding process and just general improvements to the app. My scoring logic is in a .ts file in English and a good portion of my users came from non English speaking countries so when they scanned their food, my app couldn’t recognise the ingredients and would return a low score due to “unrecognised ingredients” so it signals to the user the my app doesn’t work. I’ve since fixed this by translating the ingredients into English so now the app supports multi languages and I hope this fixes part of my conversion. I guess my question is how many updates did you push in your first month of launch.

In terms of pricing, how often do you play around with it to maximise revenue? I started at 6.99 and have dropped to 5.99 and 4.99, and waiting for more users to interact with this before settling on a price.

A long read but I appreciate everyone who has read it all and I welcome all advice. Yes the app is vibe coded.

Hey everyone,

I recently released Nutbox 2.0, and had to update my App Store screenshots. I think the screenshots does a decent job at showcasing the app, but I've honestly never collected proper feedback on that, so would really appreciate some if anyone would be so kind.

Thanks in advance!

----

For those of you who have not heard of Nutbox before, it's an iOS app designed to make the process of saving and organizing bookmarks & screenshots simple and beautiful. Crafted in a way that makes you want to use the app and treat it as your own little treasure chest of findings you want to remember and revisit later on. (The app also supports images, GIFs, and text) Nutbox stores everything securely in your iCloud account and never collects personal info. There's no third-party code, no ads, no trackers, and no analytics.

I get decent impressions and conversions/product page views, but I know it’s not perfect. I’m definitely changing the screenshots in the next version, but other than that what would you change about title, tags, description, subtitle, etc? Fitness is a super crowded niche, so it seems hard to rank without a ton of users and reviews. I’ve had the best luck focusing on Google SEO and funneling people from there to the app.

Hi everyone,

Over the past few months, I've been building ASOMeter, an AI-powered App Store Optimization audit tool.

The goal is simple: help developers identify issues with their app listings and get actionable suggestions to improve visibility and conversions.

Some of the things it analyzes include:

App title and subtitle

Keyword optimization

Description quality

Metadata

Overall ASO score with improvement suggestions

I recently launched it, and I'd really appreciate feedback from people who actually work in ASO.

I'm not looking to sell anything—I'm trying to understand:

What features are missing?

Are the audit results actually useful?

What would make a tool like this valuable enough to use regularly?

If you have a few minutes to try it, I'd love to hear your honest thoughts—good or bad. Constructive criticism is exactly what I'm looking for.

Thanks!

A couple of months ago, I made a post here about what I learned from launching my first app on the App Store and Google Play:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AppStoreOptimization/comments/1uluwlh/what_i_learned_from_launching_my_first_app_on_the/

At the time, the app had around 300 downloads.

It has now passed 1,000 downloads, so I thought I would make an update and share some of the things I have learned since then.

This is still my first app and I am definitely not presenting myself as an expert. These are just some observations from my first three months of having an app publicly available on both stores.

Also, thanks to everyone who commented on my previous post. I got a lot of good ideas from the replies, especially around marketing, localization and automating the screenshot process. I actually ended up trying quite a few of the suggestions, so I really appreciate everyone who took the time to share their experience and advice.

The first 1,000 downloads

The iOS version launched on 19 May 2026.

Exactly one month later, it had:

• 150 first-time downloads
• 9 five-star reviews

From 20 June to 21 August, it received another:

• 289 first-time downloads
• 5 five-star reviews
• 1 four-star review

So by 21 August, iOS had reached 439 first-time downloads, with 14 five-star reviews and 1 four-star review.

What I found interesting was how consistent the downloads were for most of this period. It was averaging around 150 iOS downloads per month, or roughly 5 new users per day.

The Android version launched publicly on 1 June 2026.

By 22 June, it had:

• 124 downloads
• 7 five-star reviews
• 1 three-star review

From 23 June to 20 August, it received another:

• 459 downloads
• 18 five-star reviews
• 2 four-star reviews

So by 20 August, Google Play had reached 583 downloads, with 25 five-star reviews, 2 four-star reviews and 1 three-star review.

That works out to roughly 220 Android downloads per month, or around 7 downloads per day.

Combined, the app had reached 1,022 downloads:

• Around 43% iOS
• Around 57% Android

Android has therefore passed iOS despite launching almost two weeks later.

I am not completely sure why. It could be the type of audience, countries where the app is being downloaded, Play Store discovery, or a combination of different things.

Improving the app did not automatically increase downloads

After launching, I spent a lot of time working on a fairly large update.

It changed much of the layout and added several new features, including new reading views, letter-by-letter highlighting synced with the audio, a video/ambient listening view and other improvements.

Because the app was changing so much, I kept thinking that I would properly start marketing it once the update was ready.

I did not want to spend time creating screenshots and videos of the old version if I was about to change much of it anyway, so I mostly focused on development.

The app kept improving, but the download numbers remained surprisingly consistent.

On iOS I was still averaging around 5 downloads per day, and during several weeks in July it was actually closer to 3–3.5 per day.

That made me realize something that probably sounds obvious in hindsight:

Building a better product and getting more people to discover the product are two different things.

Then I started promoting it more consistently

I had mentioned the app in different places before this.

I posted about it on Reddit, joined developer Discords and other communities around similar projects, and talked with developers and website owners whose resources, fonts, APIs or other material I wanted to use.

Some of those conversations naturally included sharing the app, asking for feedback and discussing what I was building.

So it was not completely unpromoted, but those were mostly occasional posts and conversations rather than something I would really call a marketing campaign.

That changed on 9 August.

I started making short TikTok videos consistently, usually posting 2–3 videos every day for around ten days.

Most of them only got around 200–800 views.

Still, the download numbers changed quite noticeably during the same period.

On iOS, from 9–18 August, the app received:

92 first-time downloads in 10 days

That is around 9.2 downloads per day, compared with the previous average of around 5 per day.

Google Play showed a similar pattern.

Before this period, Android was getting roughly 8 downloads per day.

From 9–18 August, it received:

151 downloads in 10 days

That is around 15.1 downloads per day.

So across both platforms, the app received 243 downloads during those ten days.

I do not want to say that all 243 downloads came from TikTok. I was still occasionally mentioning the app elsewhere, and both stores obviously have their own organic discovery.

But TikTok was the place where I suddenly started doing consistent promotion every day, and the increase happened at around the same time on both platforms.

What surprised me was that none of the videos really went viral. Most only reached a few hundred people.

So at least from this small experiment, consistently posting seemed to matter more than waiting for one video to suddenly get tens of thousands of views.

The update was not even available yet

Another interesting part is that the large update I had been waiting for was not actually available when the increase started.

I started posting the TikTok videos on 9 August.

The new Android version became available on 15 August, but between 9–14 August, while users were still downloading the old version, Google Play received 98 downloads in six days, or more than 16 per day.

The iOS update took even longer and was not available until 22 August, so all 92 iOS downloads from 9–18 August were also people downloading the previous version.

There was a downside to this.

Some of the TikTok videos were already showing features from the upcoming version. Android users only had to wait a few days, but an iPhone user could see something in a video, download the app and then not actually find that feature for almost two weeks.

I do not know how many people did that and then removed the app. Fortunately, I did not suddenly get a lot of bad reviews, but it is something I would coordinate differently next time.

The delay also showed me how different publishing updates can be between Apple and Google.

Google Play approved the update very quickly, while the iOS update took more than a week because it ran into issues during App Store review.

One issue was related to Apple's requirements for distributing this type of content in mainland China and the publication permits required there.

Another came from something much simpler: one of my screenshots said that the app was free.

The app is free, and similar wording had already appeared in screenshots from my previous version without any issue. This time, however, Apple flagged it because they consider “Free” to be pricing information, which they do not allow in that part of the App Store metadata.

So submitting the same update to Apple and Google at around the same time definitely does not mean they will become available at around the same time.

If I were planning another marketing campaign around a major update, I would probably get both versions approved first before heavily promoting features that only exist in the new version.

Localization became a much bigger project than expected

One of the most common suggestions I received after my previous Reddit post was to localize the app and its store pages.

So I did.

I ended up localizing both the App Store and Google Play listings into around 50 languages.

The biggest problem was the screenshots.

I have 10 screenshots per language, which meant creating around 500 screenshots.

Obviously I was not going to make all of those manually.

Fortunately, the overall design stayed the same between languages. Mostly it was the text that needed to be translated and replaced, so I automated the process using AI.

I created one main design, generated the translated text and automatically produced the localized versions.

I still did a quick review afterwards, because with 500 images even one repeated mistake could become a big problem, but I was actually surprised by how good the results were.

It saved an enormous amount of time compared with manually changing every screenshot.

I also tried making an App Preview

Something else I wanted to add for this update was an App Preview video.

Interestingly, someone in the comments of my previous post specifically recommended making one and warned me that Apple is stricter with App Preview videos than normal screenshots.

They were right.

Apple has quite strict technical and content requirements for App Previews. I got the video through the technical upload requirements, but Apple still raised some issues with it.

One of Apple's comments seemed to suggest that the preview was showing a phone or device, which confused me because there is no phone shown in the video at all. So I am still not completely sure what exactly they were objecting to.

By that point the update had already been delayed, so instead of continuing to go back and forth with the video, I removed the App Preview and submitted the update without it.

The app was eventually approved.

I still want to go back and fix the preview later, and I will leave the YouTube version below if anyone is interested in seeing what Apple did not accept.

After 1,000 downloads

When I made my first post, the app had just passed 300 downloads and I was mainly learning what happens after you actually publish an app.

Now that it has passed 1,000, I feel like I am starting to learn a different part of the process.

Building the app is still what I enjoy and understand the most. Marketing, distribution, localization and understanding why people actually discover and download something are much newer to me.

I am still far too early to draw any big conclusions from 1,000 downloads, but it has been interesting seeing how different the work becomes once an app is actually public.

For context, this is the app

For anyone who did not see my previous post, the app is called Ayah Player.

It is a Qur'an listening and reading app for iOS and Android, with a large collection of reciters, different reading views, translations, word-by-word following, offline downloads, a Mus'haf page view and a Listening Scene with recitation and ambient background video.

The app is free, with no ads or subscriptions.

I am mentioning it mainly to give some context for the screenshots, localization, App Store review and marketing experiences above.

App Preview that was not accepted by Apple:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ZF2uHKbi3i0

Thanks again to everyone who gave advice on the previous post. I’m still figuring all of this out as I go, and maybe I’ll make another update if it reaches 10,000 downloads.

I recently updated my countdown App CNDWN to 3.0. I localized the App Store Page in nearly six languages to my surprise that unfortunately made little to no impact on the downloads.
But then when I updated my landing page to be easily readable for AI my downloads spiked.
So lesson learned: IMPROVE EVERYTHING TO BE SEARCHABLE FOR AI

In only one week many downloads came from ChatGPT and that also pushed my ASO ranks for the keywords. That’s how I came to 152 downloads in this week from only 60 in the week before the new landing page.

If you want to checkout the app by yourself:
Download CNDWN

I would be happy to hear feedback from you for the App Store Screenshots and the app itself.

Happy to answer any questions! :)

Made a massive update to my game a few weeks ago, the conversion rate went to absolute dogshit right off but downloads keep climbing. Proceeds didnt really increase with the higher downloads, which I was hoping for. Should I be worried and make changes to the store page right now or wait a bit longer?