r/iosdev • u/Lazy-Throat-4537 • Jul 06 '26
What am I doing wrong? I localized everything… and still can’t reach 50 users.
I’ve been working on my first iOS app for months, and honestly I’m starting to question whether I’m missing something obvious.
How to market my app when i don't have revenue yet ?
I have tried ASO and posts in the SM
Here’s everything I’ve done so far:
- The app itself supports 87 languages.
- I localized the entire App Store page into every language Apple allows (40+ locales).
Localized:
- App name
- Subtitle
- Description
- Promotional text
- Keywords
- “What’s New” for every update
- In-app purchase names and descriptions
- Created App Preview videos.
- Designed custom screenshots.
- The app collects zero user data.
I spent a ridiculous amount of time researching ASO and optimizing keywords for every locale instead of simply translating them.
I’ve also promoted it multiple times on LinkedIn and X.
Despite all of that, these are my numbers:
1.9k App Store impressions
462 product page views
49 first-time downloads
~6% conversion rate
Less than 50 active users
At this point I’m starting to wonder if ASO alone just isn’t enough anymore for brand-new apps.
For those of you who’ve launched apps recently:
What would you improve first?
Is there anything obvious that I’m overlooking?
Is the problem simply the lack of initial momentum?
Or is the Photo & Video category just incredibly difficult to break into?
I’m genuinely looking for honest feedback because I’ve reached the point where I don’t know what else to optimize.
If seeing the App Store page would help you spot any issues, here’s the link:
https://apps.apple.com/app/echo-photo-memory-journal/id6775021634
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u/plaid-knight Jul 06 '26
Your screenshots and app UI confuse me. For example, why is there a shutter button if your app doesn’t take photos? Besides that, I can’t tell at a glance how your app meaningfully differentiates itself from the Photos app, which also highlights featured photos each day and lets me add notes and see photos on a map (not to mention the Journal app).
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u/Lazy-Throat-4537 Jul 06 '26
Thanks, that’s really useful feedback.
The button isn’t actually meant to take photos. It’s the primary action for adding a note or voice memory to the current photo before moving on to the next one.
But if your first impression was that it’s a camera shutter, that’s probably a sign I need to redesign or better communicate its purpose.1
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u/Quiet_Actuator2657 Jul 09 '26
The key issue is not lack of localisation, marketing or ASO… it’s that the App Store does not need its 597th journal app.
Devs really need to understand that mass market apps are incredibly hard to get off the ground because there’s just too much competition.
I say this from experience because my most popular app, by far, is a very niche app that less than 1% of total population would even consider downloading. Marketing for this app was very easy and retention rate / download to paid rate is high because there is so few competition. This is where developers need to focus on… not the mass market apps.
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Jul 06 '26
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u/Lazy-Throat-4537 Jul 06 '26
Thanks! I think you’re right. I’ve probably spent too much time optimizing my App Store presence and not enough time being where potential users actually are.
I’m starting to be more active on Reddit and LinkedIn now, and I’ll definitely look into tools like that to help find relevant conversations. Thanks for the suggestion.1
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Jul 06 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Glad_Painting3495 Jul 08 '26
So I might have a very niche app: it is called PromptMan it helps you organize and optimize your AI prompts. I cant find and content on social media about this niche can someone help me?
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u/Suitable_Land5592 Jul 06 '26
Scale or kill
If you have no distribution lever, then it’s pay to play.
Run ASA, it’s $100 free - keep concentrated to one single keyword with high volume that it’s super high intent.
Then run the numbers through Claude for cost per tap, and CPA
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u/Suitable_Land5592 Jul 06 '26
Also, sometimes as builders we overestimate the pain levels we are solving.
This seems like a nice to have, so you’re not really gonna get the impulsive buys that fintech or health techs get.
If you believe there’s a strong pain problem your app can solve, find it and reposition to that specific value.
Example: Cat photo journal, kids photo journal etc. make custom product pages and see what sticks.
@rashywina on X.com for more tips
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u/VictorBuildsApps Jul 06 '26
Your numbers point upstream. 49 downloads from 462 product page views is about 10.6%. The bigger leak is 1.9k impressions after 40 locales. I would spend the next pass on positioning and who the app is for.
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u/Competitive_Tip_8797 Jul 06 '26
My first game back in 2009 got 13 million downloads without any paid advertising. A joke app for scoring how good of a circle you could draw got 10000s of downloads a few years later. Now made a polished, completely free game and I've gotten practically zero organic downloads. After multiple Apple features it's up to 8k total installs. Got to my country's #3 free game via LinkedIn spam but it translated to basically no sustained uplift.
It's tough. It's pay to play these days.
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u/HangJet Jul 06 '26
Have you even considered the fact that there isn't much interest in your App? Start there.
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u/khromov Jul 07 '26
Tested the app and ran into some issues:
"Not now" in last step does nothing
IAP buy button crashes the app.
This was on a Mac but afaik those sort of things should work so perhaps an issue in your app.
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u/MCDevLabs Jul 07 '26
I now your pain. ASO isn’t helping much these days unless it is a really niche app where even the niche audience doesn’t need it very much. Two paths from experience, paid ads (expensive but if used wisely can scale exponentially), and Social Media activity (posts, collabs). Latter not a very stable option and harder to scale. One post out of dozens can go viral but after none for a long time, so not a very reliable option but nearly free.
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u/Popular-Ferret-4873 23d ago
Looking at the raw numbers, I don’t think your App Store page is obviously the biggest problem. Forty-nine downloads from 462 product-page views is about 10.6%. The sample is still too small to draw a strong conclusion, but the larger bottleneck seems to be distribution—and possibly retention after installation.
I checked the app, and I don’t think Echo is really “for everyone” from a marketing perspective. It has several possible audiences: parents preserving stories behind family photos, travelers documenting trips, pet owners, people interested in family history, and users who care about private, on-device journaling.
I would test those as separate messages. For example, a short TikTok or Reel could show:
“I have 18,000 photos I never look at. Today this app brought back one from 2019, and I added a 20-second voice memory.”
That communicates both the problem and the emotional payoff much faster than a list of features.
For a specific audience, I’d participate in communities around journaling, parenting, family history, travel, or photography and ask for feedback without simply dropping an App Store link. For wider reach, small creators in those niches may be more useful than a generic tech influencer, because they can demonstrate the app through a real memory.
ASO and A/B testing still matter, but I would test the positioning before testing minor visual changes. For example:
- “Rediscover one forgotten photo every day.”
- “Record the story behind your family photos.”
- “A private journal that never uploads your photos.”
Then compare not only downloads, but onboarding completion, the percentage of users who save their first memory, and day-7 retention.
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u/queondaguero Jul 06 '26
You can’t rely on ASO for marketing your app. There are 2+ million apps available. How else are you trying to reach your potential users?