ASO when nobody browses the store any more

The original ASO playbook assumed a specific human being: someone who opens the App Store with nothing particular in mind, browses a category, scrolls a chart, and picks something. Everything downstream (keyword stuffing in the title, chasing category rank, obsessing over the icon's contrast in a grid of twelve) followed from that person existing.

That person is now rare. Discovery moved, and it moved in four directions at once.

Where it went

Search with a name. A large share of store searches are now for an app the person already knows about. The store isn't the discovery surface; it's the checkout. They heard the name somewhere else and came to install it.

Answers instead of lists. "What's the best app for putting my todo list on my Mac wallpaper" used to return a store search page. Increasingly it returns a paragraph naming three apps, assembled from web pages, forum threads and reviews, not from your listing metadata. You are being summarised before you're ever visited.

Video and social. A thirty-second clip of the app doing the thing, on someone else's account, drives more installs than any keyword change you will make this quarter.

The web, into the store. Someone searches a problem, lands on an article or a comparison page, and clicks through to your listing with intent already formed.

In three of those four, the person arrives at your listing already convinced. The listing's job changed from persuading a browser to confirming a decision, and everything about how you write it should follow that.

What still matters, in order

1. Being nameable

If you can't be referred to in one sentence, you can't be recommended, not by a person, and not by a machine summarising a forum thread. "The todo app whose list is your wallpaper" is nameable. "A powerful productivity suite" is not.

This is now upstream of every other item on this page. Everything else is downstream of somebody being able to say what you are.

2. Existing outside the store

An app that exists only as a store listing has almost no surface for anything to cite. A real product page, an honest comparison against the alternatives, a changelog, a support page that answers actual questions, these are what get read, quoted and summarised.

That's not a growth hack. It's the observation that the systems now doing discovery read the web, and a store listing is a very thin, very late part of the web.

3. The fields that are still hard limits

Both stores still index text, and the constraints are unforgiving:

Apple has a separate 100-character keyword field that users never see; Play has no keyword field and indexes your description instead. So the same text does different jobs on each store: on Play, the description is a ranking input; on Apple, it's read by humans who scrolled.

Two rules that survive from the old playbook:

• Don't repeat words between title and subtitle on Apple, you're wasting characters that could carry a different term.
• Front-load Play's 80-character short description. It's the first thing shown and often the only thing read.

4. Screenshots, which are the actual pitch

The description is mostly unread. The first two screenshots are seen by everyone, in search results, before any tap. If your app is not self-evident from those two frames with their captions, the listing is not doing its job, and no keyword work will compensate.

We wrote the exact dimensions up separately, because getting them wrong is the other half of this problem.

5. Ratings, and what people say in them

Review text is the raw material for a great deal of what now gets summarised about your app. A one-star review that names a specific bug is a durable liability that will be quoted for years. Reply to them. Fix them. Ask happy users at a moment when they're actually happy: after a task succeeds, not on second launch.

What to stop doing

• Chasing chart position. Charts are downstream of installs, and installs are now driven from off-store. Ranking is a scoreboard, not a lever.
• Keyword stuffing the title. You get 30 characters. Spend them on being nameable.
• A/B testing the icon before the app is nameable. You're optimising a conversion rate on traffic you don't have.
• Writing the description for the algorithm. On Apple it isn't indexed. On Play it is, but a description written for machines reads badly to the humans who reach the bottom of the page, and those are the ones about to install.

What we do about our own listings

We built an ASO audit tool: paste a store URL and it scores the listing (icon, title, subtitle, screenshots and copy) against the limits above and returns the fixes ranked by how much they're likely to matter.

It exists because we ran the same checks by hand across nine listings, found the same four mistakes repeatedly, and got tired of doing it manually. It's free, it runs in the browser, and it will tell you unflattering things about your own app, which is the entire point of an audit.