App store optimisation and growth

Store optimisation is the cheapest growth work available and the most commonly skipped, because it happens at the end of a project when everyone is tired. It is also the only channel where you compete for someone who is already looking for what you built.

Store optimisation is the only acquisition channel where the person is already searching for what you built. It is cheaper than any paid channel and it compounds. Skipping it because the launch date is close is the single most common growth mistake we see.

What actually moves installs

The first screenshot

Most people decide from the search results page without ever opening your listing, which means the icon, the title and the first screenshot are doing nearly all the work. A first screenshot that shows the app doing its job, with a short caption, outperforms a beautiful device mockup of a screen whose purpose is unclear.

The title and subtitle

These carry the most keyword weight of anything you control and they are also the first thing a human reads, so they have two jobs at once. The failure mode is optimising only for one: a title stuffed with keywords wins impressions and loses installs, and a purely brand-led title is invisible to anybody who does not already know you.

Ratings, and when you ask

Rating average affects both ranking and the decision to install. The mechanics matter more than most teams realise: asking for a rating after somebody has succeeded at something produces a very different average from asking on a timer, or worse, on first launch. Both platforms provide a review prompt, and where you place it is a design decision with a measurable outcome.

Retention, which decides everything downstream

Both stores weight engagement heavily, so an app that people keep using ranks better than one with the same install count that people abandon. This is why growth work cannot be separated from product work. Buying installs for an app that does not retain is paying to make your ranking worse.

The two stores are not the same problem

The practical consequence is that a listing written once and pasted into both stores wastes most of the opportunity in whichever store it was not written for.

The first ninety days

1. Before launch, research the words people actually use for your problem, which are frequently not the words you use internally.
2. Write each listing for its own store rather than adapting one to the other.
3. Instrument what matters before launch: activation, day-one and day-seven retention, and where people leave onboarding. Adding this later means the first month is unmeasurable.
4. Ship with a staged rollout so an unlucky release reaches a fraction of users.
5. Change one thing at a time and give it long enough to read. Changing the icon, title and screenshots together teaches you nothing about which one worked.
6. Read the reviews properly. They are the cheapest user research available and they name the confusion your onboarding created.

Fix retention before buying traffic. Paid installs into a leaky product convert a marketing budget into a worse ranking, which is an unusually expensive way to go backwards.

What we do

Listing research and copy for both stores, screenshot design that shows the product rather than decorating it, review prompt placement, analytics instrumentation before launch rather than after, staged rollouts, and a testing cadence that produces readable results rather than a pile of simultaneous changes.

We run this on our own apps, which between them carry over ten million downloads and a rating average above 4.75. That number is the outcome of the unglamorous parts of this list, not of a growth tactic.

What we will not do

Incentivised installs, review manipulation, and keyword tactics that violate store policy. Beyond being against the rules of both platforms, they work briefly and then remove your app, which ends the growth conversation permanently.