How to make your app stand out in the app store

According to Apple’s third-quarter financial report, there are currently 650,000 apps in the Apple App store . AppBrain statistics show that there are 530,000 apps on Google Play as of September. This number is growing at a rate of nearly 40% per year. Why are there so many new apps launched every year, but we only know about a few? As a developer, how can you stand out from the crowd of apps? Today in San Francisco, Tyler York, who is responsible for marketing and promotion of Betable, a mobile game advertising and marketing platform that won 3 million users in 6 months, shared his experience.

Search Engine Optimization

To help users find your app, you first need to understand how the Apple App store and Google Play sort search results.

If a user searches for an iOS app, the App store will sort it like this: Name → Keyword → Downloads → Rating (number of times) → Rating (number of stars)

So if you can add keywords into your name, it will be easily searchable. For example, there is an application called Photo Editor by Aviary. Users can see it immediately when searching for photo or photo editor because its name is all keywords and also includes the company name.

It is worth mentioning that there are some changes in the App Store of iOS 6:

1) The first app screenshot will be displayed when sorting (so it is better to take a running screenshot rather than a directory screenshot)

2) The ranking is no longer affected by the developer’s status

3) Ratings become more important

4) The first use of keyword cloud, that is, searching for applications in one category may result in applications in expanded categories.

If a user searches for an Android app, Google Play will sort it like this: name → keywords → more keywords → competing apps

In addition to the same name and keywords as the iOS system, using keywords multiple times in the description of the Android application is also a SEO method. Take the photo editor above as an example. If a user searches for photo editor, an app that has the word "photo editor" six times in its description will rank higher than an app that has the word "photo editor" five times in its description.

Short and exquisite description

As mentioned above, the text in the description needs to contain multiple keywords, but it should not be too long.

Tyler York says a good description should have two parts:

1. Explain in one sentence what this application does

2. Give examples to explain why users should choose this app and what makes it special compared to similar apps. At this time, you can use user comments, media reports, friends' praise, etc.

Eye-catching icons

In such a huge app store , if an icon fails to attract the user’s attention within 1.5 seconds on average, he will ignore you. The appearance of an icon not only reflects the design level of the app itself, but also increases the chance of being downloaded. Tyler York believes that a well-designed icon must have a simple and novel logo, and the color of the icon must be bright. For example, if users search for whoopie cushion, they will find that iFart Alert is the only comment on the first page with more than 10,000 comments, which means that its icon attracts many people to download it.

York teaches everyone a simple and effective testing method:

Place your app icon among a pile of icons, then walk 3 meters away from the screen and see if you can find your icon at a glance. If you can, then you succeed!

Since icons are so important, developers can consider asking design companies to help with the design (such as TheSkinFactory, SoftFacade and IconFactor, etc.) or drawing them at home by themselves. You can refer to some online tutorials, such as this course on Udemy.

Defeating the Opponents

1. Find out the keywords commonly used by your competitors

2. Use data analysis websites to find out the gap between yourself and your opponents. Tyler York recommends two websites:

MobileDevHQ: A website that analyzes app store keyword search results. You can compare your app with your competitors' apps.

App Annie: A free website that provides app market analysis data. 80% of the top 100 downloaded apps in North America use App Annie to research the market.

Is it harder than climbing to the sky to get on the "Recommended" page or "Editor's Choice"?

Being on the recommendation page is very exciting because it means that your app has reached the top of the world.

The apps on the recommended page have the following in common:

Beautiful interface design, innovative themes, high popularity, using the technological features of iPhone (iPad)/Android phones (such as screen flipping) to bring users a new experience.

Android developers can recommend their apps to Google Play Friday Review.

Finally, Tyler York concluded that the quality of an application is king. Developers are happy, users are happy, and the platform is happy too. If it is a boring app written casually, no matter how hard you try, it will not have many downloads and many good reviews, so developers should still focus more on optimizing the app.