Your app store listing is your most important marketing asset for organic downloads. A properly optimised listing ranks higher in store search, converts more browsers into downloaders, and costs nothing beyond the time to optimise it.
ASO has two distinct goals that require different optimisation strategies. The first is ranking — appearing high in search results when people search for apps like yours. The second is conversion — convincing people who see your listing to download your app. Both matter equally, but they are optimised differently.
The iOS subtitle gives you 30 additional characters that carry ranking weight almost as strong as the title. Most apps leave this empty — a major missed opportunity. Use it for your secondary keyword that did not fit in the title.
Screenshots without text callouts underperform against screenshots that highlight specific features. Add 3-5 word feature callouts to each screenshot. A/B test with Apple's Product Page Optimisation or Google's Store Listing Experiments.
Apps with preview videos convert significantly better than those without. A 15-30 second video showing the app in use — not a flashy animation — is the highest-impact conversion improvement available to most apps.
Apps where developers respond to reviews — especially negative ones — show higher conversion rates. Responses signal that the app is actively maintained and that issues get resolved.
Almost every failed app store listing fails for the same reason: the same copy was pasted into both stores, and the two stores read completely different fields. Apple builds its search index from the app name, the subtitle, the keywords field, the developer name and the display names of your in-app purchases. It does not index the description. You can write four thousand characters of immaculate copy on iOS and not a single word of it will affect where you rank.
Google Play works the other way round. It has no hidden keywords field at all. It indexes the title, the short description and the full description. On Google Play, the description is the keyword field, and treating it as a brochure throws away your entire ranking surface.
| Field | Limit | Indexed? |
|---|---|---|
| App name (iOS) | 30 characters | Yes — heaviest weight |
| Subtitle (iOS) | 30 characters | Yes |
| Keywords field (iOS) | 100 characters | Yes — hidden from users |
| Promotional text (iOS) | 170 characters | No |
| Description (iOS) | 4,000 characters | No |
| Title (Google Play) | 30 characters | Yes — heaviest weight |
| Short description (Google Play) | 80 characters | Yes |
| Full description (Google Play) | 4,000 characters | Yes |
Read that table before you write a single word of copy. It dictates where the effort goes. On iOS your entire ranking vocabulary is 160 characters — name, subtitle and keywords combined. On Play you have 4,110 characters of indexed text and no hidden field to hide keywords in, so they have to be worked into prose a human will read.
The iOS keywords field is the single most misused element in app store optimisation. It is hidden from users, it is 100 characters, and most listings burn a third of it on characters that were never going to help.
Write photo,editor,collage,filter, not photo, editor, collage, filter. Each space after a comma is a character you have spent on nothing. Across a full field that habit typically costs eight to twelve characters — roughly one more keyword you could have ranked for.
Apple matches queries against the combined set of indexed fields. A word in your app name is already in the index; entering it again in the keywords field buys you exactly nothing and costs you the characters. The same applies to your developer name and your category name — both are already indexed and neither belongs in the field.
Apple constructs multi-word matches by combining the individual terms you supply. If you enter photo,editor,collage, you become eligible for "photo editor", "collage editor" and "photo collage" without spending characters on any of those phrases. Entering the phrase "photo editor" as a phrase wastes the combinatorial advantage.
Apple's matching handles singular and plural forms, so entering both "recipe" and "recipes" duplicates for no gain. Likewise skip "the", "a", "for", "and", and — a perennial offender — the word "app". Nobody searching an app store needs to be told they are looking for an app.
The most common strategic error is spending all 100 characters on head terms. A new app with no download velocity will not rank in the top 10 for a term where the incumbents have millions of installs, and ranking 60th for a high-volume term delivers zero downloads — nobody scrolls that far in an app store. Two or three long-tail terms where you can realistically reach the first screen will out-perform a field packed with terms you will never surface for.
The title carries more ranking weight than any other field on both platforms, and you have 30 characters on each. That is not enough room for a slogan, a tagline, and a keyword — so it has to be a deliberate allocation.
If your brand has recall — people search for it by name — lead with the brand and follow with the keyword, separated by a colon or a dash. If it does not, and for the overwhelming majority of new apps it does not, the brand is doing nothing for you in the index. Lead with the descriptive keyword phrase and put the brand second. Nobody is searching for a name they have never heard.
The iOS subtitle gets 30 indexed characters, and the most common way to waste them is to write something inspirational. "Reach your potential" indexes for nothing anybody searches. "Track workouts, runs and sleep" indexes for three separate concepts and simultaneously tells a human being what the app does. Both audiences — the index and the reader — are served by concrete nouns.
They are indexed together. A word used twice is a word charged twice and counted once. With only 60 combined characters, a single repeated word can cost you an entire concept.
It is indexed, and it sits above the fold on the listing page where it is one of the first things a browsing user reads. It needs the primary keyword and a reason to install, in one sentence. Treat it as the hardest 80 characters you will write.
Because Play indexes the full description, keyword placement matters — but so does restraint. Repeating your primary keyword roughly five times across 4,000 characters is enough for the index to understand the page. Beyond that you are stuffing, and stuffing hurts twice: it reads badly to humans, dragging down conversion, and it risks a policy flag against Play's spam rules on repetitive or irrelevant keywords.
Only the first three lines or so are visible before the "read more" fold. Those lines have to carry the primary keyword and the reason to install. Play renders a limited set of formatting tags — bold, italic and line breaks — so break the body into short paragraphs and scannable feature lists rather than a wall of prose.
Since Apple indexes none of it, every word of the iOS description exists to convert someone who has already found you. That changes the writing entirely. Lead with the single strongest benefit in the first three lines — that is all that shows before the reader must tap "more", and most never do. Company history, funding announcements and awards belong at the bottom, if anywhere.
The 170-character promotional text sits above the description and — critically — can be changed without submitting a new app version. It is not indexed, so do not put keywords there. Use it for what it is uniquely good at: a current offer, a seasonal hook, a "now with" announcement that would otherwise require a release to communicate.
In iOS search results, the store previews the first three portrait screenshots inline — or just the first if it is landscape. That is the whole shop window. Screenshots four through ten are seen only by people who have already opened your listing, which means they are working on a user who is most of the way to converting anyway.
iOS permits up to 10 screenshots per device size; Google Play permits up to 8 phone screenshots and requires a minimum of 2. Almost no listing needs all of them, and a strong three beats a mediocre ten.
On iOS you can supply up to three app previews of 15 to 30 seconds each, and they autoplay, muted, in search results. That single fact should dictate the edit. Because there is no sound and the viewer did not choose to press play, the first three seconds must communicate the app's purpose visually or the video is simply a moving thumbnail. Opening on a logo animation burns those three seconds at the exact moment the decision is being made.
Google Play does the opposite. The video is a YouTube link, it does not autoplay in search results, and the user must tap a play button laid over the feature graphic. On Play, therefore, the 1024×500 feature graphic is doing most of the work the video does on iOS — and a feature graphic that is just a logo on a gradient is a wasted asset.
The highest-converting previews on both stores show the app being used, screen-recorded, at a realistic pace. Not a motion-graphics showreel. The viewer is trying to answer one question — "will this do the thing I want?" — and footage of the thing being done answers it faster than anything else.
Both stores use rating volume and rating average as ranking signals, and both use them again as conversion signals — a 3.4-star average visibly depresses install rate even when the app ranks well. Google Play weights recent ratings more heavily than old ones, which means an average genuinely can recover after a bad release; a wave of new positive ratings will pull it up faster than the raw arithmetic suggests.
On iOS, the compliant way to request a rating is the system prompt via SKStoreReviewController, and Apple limits it to three prompts per user per 365 days. That scarcity is the whole game. Firing it on app launch — before the user has experienced anything worth rating — spends one of three chances on a user with no opinion. Fire it after a success moment: a completed workout, an exported file, a solved puzzle. The user who has just succeeded at something is the user who rates five stars.
On Google Play, a developer reply is public and notifies the reviewer, and a meaningful proportion of users will revise a one-star review upward after a response that actually addresses the problem. Beyond the individual rating, the reply is read by every prospective user who scrolls the reviews — an unanswered wall of complaints reads as an abandoned app.
This is the part of ASO that has nothing to do with copywriting, and it is the part most listing audits skip. Google Play monitors runtime quality through Android vitals and defines explicit bad behaviour thresholds: a user-perceived crash rate above 1.09% or a user-perceived ANR (Application Not Responding) rate above 0.47%. Exceeding them can reduce your app's visibility in the store, including suppression from recommendation surfaces. No amount of keyword work compensates for that.
On iOS, each localisation you add carries its own app name, subtitle and 100-character keywords field. That is not a translation exercise — it is an additional indexed vocabulary. The best-known consequence: in the United States storefront, Apple indexes both English (US) and Spanish (Mexico), so a US-only English app that fills in the Spanish (Mexico) locale gains a second full keywords field that is indexed for US searches. Many storefronts similarly index English (UK) alongside the local language, which means the same trick is available across much of Europe.
The discipline that matters here is not to machine-translate and forget. A keyword that is high-volume in English is often not the word people actually search in the target language, and a literal translation will index for a term nobody types. Where you cannot research the target language properly, the safer play is to use the extra field for additional English terms that did not fit in the primary field — the index does not require the field to contain the language it is nominally for.
Both stores ship native experimentation tools, and they have different limits worth knowing before you plan a test.
You can run up to three treatments against your live baseline page, for a maximum of 90 days, splitting traffic between them. The catch: only the icon, screenshots and app previews can be tested this way. Title, subtitle and keywords cannot be A/B tested — changing them requires submitting a new app version, so those changes are sequential experiments measured over time, not split tests.
Separate from testing, you can create up to 35 custom product pages, each with its own URL and its own screenshots and text, to match specific campaigns or audiences. A page whose screenshots speak directly to the ad that sent the user converts substantially better than a generic one.
Play allows up to five variants including the current listing, and — unlike Apple — will test text as well as graphics. It reports its own confidence interval, and you should wait for it. Calling a winner on a few hundred impressions is how teams end up "optimising" their way to a worse listing with total confidence.
An ASO score is a composite measure of how well your app store listing is optimised for both ranking and conversion. It considers your title keyword usage, subtitle completeness, description quality, screenshot and video presence, ratings quantity and quality, and keyword field usage. A score of 80 or above is considered well optimised.
Choose keywords for your app title based on search volume and relevance. Your primary keyword — the one with the highest search volume that accurately describes your app — should appear in the title. The title has the highest ranking weight of any listing element. Do not stuff multiple keywords — keep the title readable and the most important keyword prominent.
Screenshots do not directly affect ranking algorithms — but they have a massive effect on conversion rate, which indirectly affects ranking. Apps with higher conversion rates are promoted by the store algorithm. High-quality screenshots with text callouts highlighting key features consistently outperform plain device screenshots.
No. Apple builds its search index from the app name, the subtitle, the 100-character keywords field, the developer name and in-app purchase display names. The iOS description is not indexed, so it should be written to convert readers rather than to carry keywords. Google Play is the opposite: it has no keywords field and does index the title, the short description and the full description.
iOS search results preview the first three portrait screenshots, or the first one if it is landscape. Screenshots in positions four to ten are only seen by users who have already opened the listing, so the core benefit must appear in the first three.
Yes. Apple's Product Page Optimization runs up to three treatments against your live page for a maximum of 90 days, covering the icon, screenshots and app previews — but not the title, subtitle or keywords, which require a new app version. Google Play's Store Listing Experiments support up to five variants and can test text as well as graphics.
On Google Play, explicitly. Android vitals defines bad behaviour thresholds — a user-perceived crash rate above 1.09% or a user-perceived ANR rate above 0.47% — and exceeding them can reduce the app's visibility in the store. Apple publishes no equivalent threshold, but crashes generate negative reviews, and reviews are a ranking input.
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