What is App Store Optimization (ASO)? A practical guide for indie developers

App Store Optimization (ASO) is the work of making your app easier to find in the App Store and Google Play, and more convincing to the people who land on its page. It covers two jobs. One is discoverability: the words, category and signals that decide where your app appears when someone searches or browses. The other is conversion: the icon, screenshots, text and ratings that decide whether someone who sees your app goes on to download it.

For an indie developer, ASO is usually the cheapest growth work available. It costs no ad budget, you can change most of it yourself, and the stores report enough data to tell whether a change helped. It is also easy to overdo: rewriting your subtitle every week to chase a rank feels productive and rarely is.

The funnel ASO works on

Both stores count roughly the same journey, with different names.

On the App Store, App Store Connect reports:

1. Impressions: how often your app was seen in search results, browse lists, the Today tab or on its own product page.
2. Product page views: how often someone opened your product page.
3. Downloads: first-time downloads and redownloads.

The conversion rate App Store Connect shows compares downloads with unique-device impressions, so it measures the whole step from "seen" to "downloaded", not just the product page.

On Google Play, Play Console reports store listing visitors: people who reached your store listing and did not already have the app on any device. Play's acquisition reports now count unique users who clicked Install, Open or Pre-register, and show a click-through rate in place of the older conversion rate. The older "store listing acquisitions" figure is still available in Statistics and CSV exports, which matters if you compare a recent month with an old one.

Each stage has its own levers:

Downloads that come from people finding you in the store, rather than from ads, are usually called organic downloads. ASO aims at those.

How the two stores differ

The stores look alike from the outside but read your listing differently.

App Store

Apple says search results depend on text relevance (your app name, subtitle, keywords and primary category) and on user behaviour, such as downloads, ratings and reviews. You control the text directly and the behaviour only indirectly.

• App name and subtitle are visible and can each be up to 30 characters.
• The keyword field is hidden from customers and holds 100 characters in total. It is where most App Store keyword work happens: single words, separated by commas, that you do not already use in the name or subtitle.
• The description is not used for search the way it is on Google Play. It still matters for conversion, for the people who read it.
• Product page optimization lets you test alternative icons, screenshots and app previews against your current page. Custom product pages are additional versions of your page with their own screenshots and URLs, for example for an ad campaign.

Changing the name, subtitle, keywords or description needs a new app version. Promotional text can be changed at any time.

Google Play

Google Play has no separate keyword field. Your text lives in the app name (up to 30 characters), the short description (up to 80) and the full description (up to 4,000), and Google reads all of them. That makes the description an ASO field on Android, not just sales copy. Google also warns that repeating keywords or adding irrelevant ones can get an app suspended, so writing for people and naming what the app does plainly is the safer path.

• Store listing experiments let you test graphics (icon, feature graphic, screenshots) and, in localized experiments, descriptions, against your current listing.
• Custom store listings show a different listing to people from a given country, a search keyword, a Google Ads campaign or a unique URL.

You can update a Google Play listing without shipping a new build.

Keywords and ranks

A keyword ranking is your app's position in the results for a search term in one store and one country. It is a useful signal and an easy one to misread.

• A rank is a position, not traffic. Being third for a phrase almost nobody types brings almost nobody.
• Popularity and difficulty scores from third-party tools are estimates. They help you compare terms with each other. They are not counts of searches, and different tools disagree.
• Search is only one way people find apps. Browse, web referrals, links in communities, ads and searches for your own name all bring visitors. App Store Connect's source breakdown (App Store search, App Store browse, app referrer, web referrer) shows where yours come from. If most visitors arrive from somewhere other than generic search, keyword work is not your first lever.

For keyword research on the App Store, start with what your app actually does in the words a new user would type, check which of those words you already rank for, and use the keyword field for the rest. On Google Play, work the same words into the title and descriptions in plain sentences.

What ASO cannot do

ASO changes who sees your listing and how convincing it is. It does not change the product behind it.

• It cannot fix an app people uninstall after a day. If the retention rate is low, a better listing brings more people to the same leaky experience.
• It cannot make a small search term large. If few people search for what your app does, ranking first for it has a low ceiling.
• It does not work instantly. App Store text changes ship with a new version, ranks move over days and weeks, and a week of data for a small app is often too noisy to judge.
• It cannot be measured from ranks alone. A rank that improved while downloads stayed flat is not a win.
• It does not tell you what a download is worth. Revenue depends on pricing and retention, and the store keeps a share of every sale (see proceeds vs revenue).
• It does not replace ratings. A listing with few or poor recent ratings loses people however good the screenshots are.

How to measure an ASO change

The method matters more than the tool.

1. Write down the change and the date. One change at a time when you can; a new icon and new screenshots in the same week cannot be told apart.
2. Pick the stage you expect to move. New keywords should move impressions from search; new screenshots should move the conversion rate. Decide before you look.
3. Compare like with like. The same store, country and length of period before and after, with the same definitions. Weekdays and weekends differ, so compare whole weeks.
4. Watch the counts, not only the rates. A conversion rate that doubles from three downloads to six is still a handful of people.
5. Use the store's own experiments when you can. Product page optimization and store listing experiments split traffic for you, which removes most of the guesswork about what else changed.

The playbook chapters on discoverability and measuring an intervention go further, with worksheets for both.

Where to start with one app

If you have a single app and a few hours:

1. Read your App Store Connect and Play Console acquisition reports for the last 28 days and note where visitors come from.
2. Read your listing as a stranger would: does the first screenshot say what the app does?
3. Fill the App Store keyword field with words you do not already use in the name and subtitle; on Google Play, check that the descriptions name what the app does in plain words.
4. Choose one change, ship it and write down the date.
5. Check the same stage of the funnel after two to four full weeks.

Where Indevaro fits

Indevaro shows App Store Connect and Google Play store performance side by side, with the date of the data, tracks keyword ranks per country and language, and keeps a change, its reasoning and its follow-up together so you can check the result later. It does not publish listing changes for you, does not run store experiments, does not estimate other apps' downloads, and does not manage ads or reply to reviews. Google Play ranks are read from Google Play's web search results and cover the top 50 only. You still make and ship the change in App Store Connect or Play Console.