- The App Store and Google Play index different fields. Apple reads title, subtitle and a hidden 100-character keyword field; Google Play reads your full description. One listing written for both loses on both.
- ASO is half visibility and half conversion. Ranking for a term you convert at 2% is worth less than ranking lower for one you convert at 12%.
- Your icon and first two screenshots do most of the conversion work, because they are what appears in search results before anyone taps through.
- Both stores have free native A/B testing — Apple Product Page Optimization and Google Play store listing experiments. Most apps never switch them on.
- Ratings and reviews affect both ranking and install rate. Prompt at the right moment in-app rather than asking everyone at launch.
- ASO services in India run Rs 20,000 to Rs 1,20,000 per month. Below that band, nobody is doing localisation or creative testing.
Why ASO Services Decide Whether an App Grows
Most apps do not fail because the product is bad. They fail because nobody finds them, and the ones who do find them scroll past. Store search remains the largest single source of app discovery, and it is the only channel where an install costs you nothing incremental. Every other route — paid social, search ads, influencer pushes — stops producing the day the budget stops. A well-optimised listing keeps converting for as long as the app exists.
That is the commercial case for App Store Optimization services, and it has an uncomfortable corollary: if your listing converts poorly, you are also overpaying for every paid install, because paid traffic lands on the same product page organic traffic does. Publishers often discover that their cost per install was never really an ad problem. It was a listing problem being paid for twice.
The mechanics differ enough from web search that experience does not transfer cleanly. There are no backlinks. There are hard character limits. Install velocity and retention feed ranking directly, which means product quality is a ranking factor in a way it never quite is on the web. And crucially, the two stores work differently enough that treating them as one channel is the most common and most expensive mistake in ASO. If you want the web-side equivalent first, our SEO fundamentals guide covers that ground.
The two stores are not one channel
This is the single most valuable thing on this page. Apple indexes your app name, your subtitle and a hidden 100-character keyword field that users never see — and it does not index your description at all. Google Play has no keyword field whatsoever and indexes your entire 4,000-character long description. Those are not small differences in emphasis. They are opposite architectures.
The practical consequence: a description written to be keyword-rich is wasted effort on iOS, where nobody indexes it, while a short punchy description leaves Google Play with almost nothing to rank you on. Meanwhile the iOS keyword field — the highest-leverage 100 characters in mobile marketing — sits empty or stuffed with plurals and repeated words that Apple already combines automatically. We see this on the majority of apps we audit.
| Apple App Store | Google Play | |
|---|---|---|
| Title | 30 characters, indexed | 30 characters, indexed |
| Second field | Subtitle, 30 chars, indexed | Short description, 80 chars, indexed |
| Keyword field | 100 chars, hidden, indexed | None — does not exist |
| Description | Not indexed for search | 4,000 chars, fully indexed |
| A/B testing | Product Page Optimization | Store listing experiments |
| Quality signals | Ratings, reviews, velocity | Ratings, retention, crash and ANR rate |
Keyword research for apps is a different job
App keyword research starts from how users describe their problem, not how you describe your product. Someone looking for an expense tracker searches "track spending", "budget app", "money manager" — rarely the feature names on your roadmap. Volume validation matters, and here Apple Search Ads is genuinely privileged infrastructure: it is the only source of true App Store search volume, which is why we treat it as research even for clients who spend nothing on it.
Prioritise mid-tail and long-tail terms. A new app will not rank for "fitness" and chasing it burns months. It can realistically rank for "home workout no equipment", and that searcher converts far better because their intent is specific. Sustainable ASO growth is the accumulation of hundreds of long-tail rankings rather than one head-term victory. Both stores also combine words across fields into phrase permutations, so a well-constructed listing ranks for far more than it explicitly targets — which is exactly why repeating a word across your title, subtitle and keyword field wastes characters you cannot spare. Our AI-assisted keyword research speeds up the discovery stage without replacing volume validation.
Conversion is half the discipline, and the cheaper half
Ranking gets you seen. Conversion decides whether being seen matters. If your listing converts at 3% and a competitor's converts at 9%, they get three times your installs from identical visibility — and their higher install velocity then pushes them above you in ranking too. Conversion compounds into visibility, which is why we treat it as the first lever rather than the finishing touch.
The assets that matter most are the ones visible before anyone taps: your icon and your first two or three screenshots, which appear directly in search results. Icons need to be legible at thumbnail size and distinct from category conventions — an icon test routinely produces the largest single conversion gain available. Screenshots should lead with the strongest benefit rather than walking through features, with caption text readable on a phone held at arm's length. Preview video helps for apps whose value is hard to convey statically, and hurts for some simple utilities, which is precisely why it belongs in a test rather than an assumption. Creative production runs through our visual identity and motion graphics teams.
Both stores give you free A/B testing. Almost nobody uses it
Apple Product Page Optimization and Google Play store listing experiments are native, free, split traffic properly and report statistical significance. They are the most underused tools in mobile marketing. Most apps still redesign their listing once a year based on whoever argued hardest in the meeting, then attribute whatever happens next to the change.
Run tests one variable at a time. Run them to significance rather than stopping when an early number looks good — small samples routinely reverse. Document results so the next test builds on the last instead of relitigating the same debate. Over a year, a monthly test cadence produces a listing nobody could have designed upfront, and the compounding is the entire point. This is the same discipline as web conversion rate optimisation, applied to a surface with far less traffic noise.
Ratings move ranking and conversion at the same time
Rating average, volume and recency all feed store ranking, and they affect install rate even more strongly. The gap between a 3.8 and a 4.6 app is enormous in conversion terms, which makes rating improvement one of the fastest available levers on total installs — often faster than any keyword work.
The method that works is unglamorous: prompt inside the app at genuine moments of success using the native rating APIs, never during onboarding and never after an error. Respond to negative reviews publicly and specifically, because users frequently update their rating after a helpful reply — one of the few ways to improve historical ratings rather than only future ones. Never incentivise, never gate by sentiment, never buy. Purchased reviews get detected, removed in bulk, and put the listing itself at risk. Where sentiment needs broader repair, our reputation management and sentiment analysis services run alongside.
Localisation multiplies your indexed surface
Each store locale is a separate index with its own title, subtitle and keyword field. Localising properly does not just translate your listing — it gives you an entirely new set of indexed characters targeting how people actually search in that market. For apps with real international demand, this is often the largest untapped visibility gain available.
The failure mode is machine-translating into thirty locales at once. That dilutes quality everywhere without adding meaningful visibility anywhere, and awkward translations damage conversion in exactly the markets you were trying to enter. Pick the locales that carry genuine download volume for your category and do those properly. India alone can justify several language listings before you look outward. The same logic drives our global SEO work on the web side.
Paid and organic belong in one plan
Apple Search Ads and Google App Campaigns are usually run by a different team from ASO, and that separation costs both. Paid data tells you which keywords actually convert before you commit organic effort. Paid installs contribute to the velocity that feeds organic ranking, so a targeted push can lift organic position on a term you care about. And organic listing quality determines the conversion rate of every paid tap you buy.
We run app promotion campaigns alongside ASO for exactly this reason, with remarketing handling re-engagement. Treated as one plan, the two channels feed each other. Treated separately, they duplicate research and contradict each other on positioning.
A new surface: assistants recommending apps
Something genuinely new is happening in app discovery. People increasingly ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity which app to use for a task, and those answers are not assembled from store listings — they come from the open web, from reviews, comparison articles, forums and your own site. An app with no web presence is invisible in that conversation regardless of how well its listing is optimised.
This makes web presence part of app discovery for the first time. A proper landing page, consistent naming and feature descriptions everywhere your app appears, coverage in publications your category reads, and reviews that agree across sources are what let a model name your app with confidence. It is the same entity work our AI SEO and ChatGPT SEO services do for brands, applied to apps — and almost no App Store Optimization company is doing it yet.
Which apps get the most from ASO services
Every app benefits, but the return varies sharply by category. Fintech and health apps face high paid acquisition costs and strict ad restrictions, which makes organic store visibility disproportionately valuable — often the only channel where unit economics work at all. Education apps see heavy seasonal search spikes around admissions and exam cycles, so ASO services have to lead demand by a quarter rather than react to it.
Commerce and food delivery apps compete on brand recall more than discovery, so conversion work and ratings usually outperform keyword expansion. Travel apps live or die on localisation, since the searcher is frequently in a different market from the business. B2B SaaS companion apps are the exception where the web does most of the work and the store listing mainly needs to convert people already sent there — which is why we scope App Store Optimization services per category rather than selling one package. See all industries we serve.
What should ASO services cost?
ASO services in India run roughly Rs 20,000 to Rs 1,20,000 per month, driven by store count, locale count and category competitiveness. Creative production is usually the largest variable — an agency shipping monthly screenshot and video variants carries real production cost that a keyword-only retainer does not. Anything materially below that band is doing keyword edits and calling it ASO. Full plans sit on our pricing page.
| Plan | From | Best for | Includes |
|---|---|---|---|
| ASO Starter | Rs 25,000/mo | One store, one locale, new or small app | ASO audit, keyword mapping, listing rewrite, icon and screenshot refresh, monthly reporting |
| ASO Growth | Rs 55,000/mo | Both stores, competitive category | Starter for iOS and Android, monthly A/B tests, preview video, ratings programme, 3 locales |
| App Scale | Rs 1,20,000+/mo | Multi-market apps and app portfolios | Per-locale strategy, Apple Search Ads management, creative production, dedicated growth manager |
Six mistakes that keep apps invisible
- One listing pasted into both stores. Wastes Apple's keyword field, starves Google Play of indexable text.
- An empty or repetitive keyword field. The highest-leverage 100 characters in mobile marketing, routinely left half-used.
- Screenshots designed for the product page. The first two appear in search results, where the decision is actually made.
- Never running a store experiment. Free, native, statistically valid, and ignored by most publishers.
- Asking for ratings on first launch. Prompts spent before the user has experienced anything worth rating.
- Machine-translating into thirty locales. Dilutes quality everywhere, converts nowhere.
How to tell whether ASO is working
Judge the campaign on install volume, impression-to-install conversion rate, keyword rank on terms carrying real intent, category rank, and day-one and day-seven retention. Store impressions on their own are the trap — they rise easily with broad low-intent visibility that never converts, and they make a stalled campaign look healthy on a slide.
Segment before concluding anything. Branded searches convert far higher than category searches, so a single blended conversion number hides the thing you actually need to know. Track per store and per locale, since the same keyword ranks differently on iOS and Android in the same country, often by a wide margin. And watch retention alongside installs: over-promising creative buys installs that churn, and churn suppresses the visibility that produced them. Competitor movement is worth monitoring on the same cadence, which is where AI competitor analysis saves time.
About Whamply Media, an ASO agency built for both stores
Founded in 2021 and headquartered in New Delhi, Whamply Media has delivered growth marketing to 500+ brands across 15+ industries in India, the US, the UK, Australia and the Gulf. Our ASO services combine keyword strategy, store listing copywriting, creative production, native A/B testing, ratings management and paid app campaigns under one roof — alongside SEO services, performance marketing and branding and creative. Start with a free ASO audit, delivered within 48 hours, or book a consultation to talk it through first.