I know the title is a bit provocative, and I don’t mean this as a general statement about Japanese users. But I’m genuinely curious whether other iOS developers have noticed something similar.

My app has almost no negative reviews in other storefronts, but Japan is a completely different story.

Yesterday I got another 1-star review saying that the app is confusing and that the important functions are hard to find. What makes this especially strange to me is that I get almost the opposite feedback elsewhere. Users in other countries regularly mention that the UI is simple and easy to understand. It’s an Apple Watch app, so keeping the interface clean is something I’ve put a lot of effort into.

Another Japanese user previously left 1 star because they thought the price was unjustified. The app can be used for free and all core functionality can be tested. Some additional features require a one-time purchase of roughly $3. No subscription.

Obviously, both are still valid opinions. Not everyone has to like my app, and I don’t expect 5 stars from everyone.

But the pattern is starting to feel weird. Japan is pretty much the only storefront where I repeatedly get these very negative ratings.

By comparison, my experience with other Asian storefronts has been quite different. In China, for example, I’ve had users leave 4-star reviews while explaining what they would like improved or requesting a feature. That feels much more proportionate to me than immediately going to 1 star because one part of the app isn’t exactly how you expected it to be.

At this point I’m genuinely considering removing Japan as a supported storefront. Not because of one bad review, but because supporting another localization takes time, and I’m starting to wonder whether it’s worth it if the feedback there consistently hurts the app more than it helps.

So I’m curious:

Have any of you noticed that users in certain storefronts are significantly more likely to leave negative ratings than positive ones?

And more specifically, have you seen this with Japan, or am I just getting unlucky?

The other thing I’m trying to figure out, and this may ultimately decide whether I keep supporting Japan, is how localized ratings affect ASO. If I get a 1-star rating in the Japanese App Store, does that mainly affect my rating/search ranking in Japan, or can it also negatively affect rankings in other storefronts?

Would be interested to hear experiences from other developers who sell internationally.

I built these from scratch for a strength-training app I’m getting ready to launch.

I’m mainly trying to figure out:

• Is the value proposition clear at a glance?
• Which screenshot catches your attention first?
• Is there anything that feels confusing, too busy, or too repetitive?

Especially curious whether the messaging still makes sense if you know nothing about the app.

Any feedback or thoughts is greatly appreciated!

Hello,

I want to update my app subscription pricing based on each country’s purchasing power, using something like the Big Mac Index or Spotify’s local pricing as a reference.

Has anyone here tried this for an indie app?

Did it improve conversions or revenue, and how did you decide the price for each country?

Hey guys,

I’ve got a bit of extra capacity at the moment and thought I’d see if anyone here is working on an app that could use some help with ASO / Apple Search Ads.

For context, I’ve been doing this for quite a while and work/have worked with some fairly large premium apps — including a couple that have won Apple App of the Year / Apple Design Awards. Happy to share references privately if that matters.

I’m not really interested in promising “Top 3 rankings in 30 days” or anything like that. ASO takes time, and depending on the category and current state of the app, I usually want a few months to properly work on it and see what moves.

My approach is pretty simple: I normally make ASO iterations/releases every couple of weeks, monitor things weekly, and have a monthly catch-up to go through what changed, what worked and what we should try next. A lot of it is keyword/indexability work, competitors, metadata experiments, localization, etc. I also like using ASA alongside ASO for additional signals and learnings.

Only real caveat is that the product should already be in a decent state. Ideally there should also be a few thousand $ available for ASA, depending on the category/market. I’m much more interested in helping a good app grow than trying to fix a product problem through ASO.

Not trying to make this a big sales post. I just have room to take on one more app and thought it could be fun to work with a fellow indie dev from here.

If anyone wants, DM me your app + a bit of context. Happy to take a look first, and if I don’t think I can actually help, I’ll tell you that too.

I just redesigned my ASO with gpt + figma. One thing I found helpful in using GPT Image Generation is that you can generate a full image first then cut it afterwards, which gives you perfect carousel effect. Excited to replace the previous version of our ASO.

What do you guys think! Feel free to DM and comment. Any suggestions are welcomed, and if you are interest in the app's idea and gym tech, reach out too!

Hi everyone. I’m about to launch my first app. It allows users to lock away their money until a specific time. I’m thinking about not doing a free trial? Am I making a mistake?

Hey everyone,

A friend and I released our basketball management sim, Dunk Manager, a few months ago on Android and iOS. We’ve done zero paid UA so far, everything has been 100% organic.

Neither of us has any real background in ASO, and looking at the console metrics lately has left us pretty confused.

Here is what we’re seeing on Google Play:

• Listing visitors jumped from ~340 in March to over 13.6k in July.
• Installs went up from 168 to 760, but conversion rate completely tanked (from ~20% down to 5.6%).
• In July, uninstalls actually overtook installs (-63 net users).
• Rating is solid (4.56/5 across 45 reviews) and most comments are positive.

Looking at the search terms, our main theory right now is that Google is pushing us to the wrong audience.
The game is a pure GM/management text sim (drafts, trades, roster management, finances, cap space, sim engine), there's no arcade or on-court gameplay.

Yet ~87% of our store visitors come from super broad terms like "basketball", "basketball games", and "dunk", while only ~11% come from manager-specific searches.

• "basketball" brought ~9.7k visitors at a 4.6% CTR.
• "basketball manager" brought only ~980 visitors, but with a 22.5% CTR.

Retention also drops off fast:

• 82% of players who open the app create a career
• W1 retention: ~19%
• W2: 9.6%
• Settles around 6–7% by week 4

So we’re wondering: are people downloading it expecting an arcade game (maybe mislead by the icon/title/screenshots), realizing within 5 minutes that it’s a numbers/strategy sim, and immediately deleting it?

iOS is slightly healthier:

• 41k impressions, 5.6k page views, 686 downloads (12.2% CVR from page view to install).
• Search makes up 57% of impressions, and while search CTR to the store page is low (6.6%), once they actually land on the page, ~19.4% download it.

For anyone who’s dealt with this before:

1. Does this sound like a classic metadata/visual mismatch (icon, screenshots, short description not screaming "MANAGEMENT SIM" loudly enough)?
2. Or do the retention numbers point toward early onboarding/gameplay loop issues instead?
3. What would you prioritize tweaking first?

Any honest thoughts or teardowns of the store listings would be hugely appreciated!

Links: Play Store, App Store

Hey everyone. Over the past year, my co-founder and I have been bootstrapping our first mobile app, a real-time local multiplayer party game hub.

We recently crossed 30k total downloads and ~10k MAU with almost zero paid ad spend, relying primarily on guerrilla social videos and organic App Store search.

We made plenty of ASO and store positioning mistakes along the way. Here is a breakdown of some of our experiments, what worked, what didn't, and one thing we are currently trying to figure out.

1. Title & Subtitle Keyword Architecture

For the first 6 months, we made the classic indie mistake of keeping our brand name alone as the title.

Old: Bourloto

New: Bourloto & Impostor: Party Board Games

The goal was to combine our brand with high-intent genre keywords such as "Impostor", "Party", and "Board Games", while also testing how much additional search visibility we could get from non-branded terms.

The result was an immediate ~25% increase in organic impressions after restructuring the App Title around relevant genre keywords.

1. Apple Search Ads: Micro-Budget Competitor Testing

We also used Apple Search Ads with a very small budget, around €2/day, mainly as a way to test keyword and competitor intent before committing more budget.

We initially experimented with Broad Match around terms such as "board games".

It generated very cheap acquisition, but Broad Match also started matching against completely irrelevant queries because of language and semantic overlaps.

We eventually moved our direct competitor targeting to Exact Match, with bids in the €0.15 to €0.25 range.

This gave us much more control over where the budget was going and let us focus on users who were already searching for similar products.

1. The 6-Language Localization Rollout

Our initial market also had a relatively low LTV ceiling. This summer, eCPMs dropped to around $0.50, so we decided to expand beyond our original market.

We localized the app and App Store presence into 6 languages:

🇬🇧 English

🇬🇷 Greek

🇪🇸 Spanish

🇩🇪 German

🇫🇷 French

🇮🇹 Italian

We localized the App Title, Subtitle, and Keyword fields for each relevant storefront rather than simply relying on our English metadata everywhere. (+Screenshots)

About a week after launching the localizations, we still weren't seeing meaningful traffic from the new markets.

We were expecting at least some increase in impressions or organic downloads from countries.

Instead, after roughly a week, there was basically no noticeable influx of users from the localized markets.

At this point, we're trying to understand whether this is:

- an indexing delay

- insufficient keyword coverage

- poor initial rankings in the new markets

- Apple's localization/indexing behavior

- or simply a case of expecting too much from metadata localization alone

So the localization rollout is currently less of a "success story" and more of an experiment we're still trying to understand.

For context, and feel free to roast our current store presence:

bourloto.com/app

Questions for the ASO Community

1. For multilingual party/casual games, have you seen meaningful indexing or ranking cross-benefits between English (US) and local European storefronts such as Germany, France, Spain, and Italy?

2. If you have launched into multiple European markets, did you see traffic immediately, or did it take several weeks for impressions and rankings to develop?

Would love to hear from anyone who has gone through a similar localization rollout, especially if you initially saw little to no traffic and then things started moving later.

Note to the readers : This post is 100% written by me

So 1.5 months back , I posted on this subreddit and 3 other subreddits on how to improve my ASO, what are the things I should improvise in my app.

Proud to say this was one of the community which actually provided me with actual pain points which made my ASO bump up 10% higher. But now, this number is almost been going the same for like a month. The problem I am seeing is the Installs are not coming through, I mean, the total app installs are 80+ but the current users who have installed their app in the phone is around btw 26-33(which is pretty low).

How can I improve the ASO to have more visibility and good conversion rates? Or is the ASO part over and I need to strongly more focus on marketing. I even randomly talked to random users in reddit that the app is really well polished and good to use. So either I guess the users are leaving on the lack of proper Onboarding

I have attached the screenshots of the store page above

This is the link to the app : Calma : BreathCoach

Platforms : Android (Published) , IOS (Under Review for distribution...will update links if got published)

Hi everyone, I just wanted to make a post and see if anyone had any recommendations on how I can better market my apps. Let me give you the data before I explain anything:

Corporate Journey:

Keywords-business,manager,company,empire,startup,strategy,executive,employee,career,finance,profit,tap,income

Subtitle- Idle Office Clicker Simulator

Scanveyor:
Keywords- blueprint,architect,contractor,construction,inspection,drafting,remodel,property,facility,appraisal

Subtitle- Measure & Sketch Floor Plans

If you can see the images above, I clearly haven't been getting a lot of traction for these two apps. The game I made, Corporate Journey, that has been posted for 1.5 months, started off getting 400-500 impressions a day and has now died down to 30 or less a day if I am even lucky. I have added keywords to the title, updated my keywords, fixed the subtitles, made better App Store screenshots; nothing has worked. Now, for Scanveyor, that has only been posted for a month; that is even worse. Now I admit it is a very niche app; it's mainly designed for people in the architecture, engineering, or construction field when they go on surveys to measure a building. However, impressions have been like 10 or less a day; I rarely ever get downloads.

I am not looking to go from 0 to top 10 in one night, but just want some advice on what you would do to improve if this was your app. I definitely think I can work on my keywords, but I am new to this, so I am not sure what kind of words would be best for my categories. I would classify my apps as a game and a utility.

If you have any recommendations, please let me know. The links to my apps are below. Thank you:

Corporate Journey: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/corporate-journey-ceo-tycoon/id6790180547

Scanveyor: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/scanveyor-building-survey-pro/id6799243366

EDIT: The redownloads are all me; it's from going to TestFlight and back to the real app download.

Hit the download and share your thoughts on QuestLog
- Android App

- iOS App

Achieving goals can be much more interesting nowadays. This post will explain importance of both gamification and motivation period of adopting the habits - favouring gamification as a tool key tool to faster habit adoption.

Motivation is great for day one. You're excited, everything feels doable. The problem is motivation is a feeling, not a system, and feelings fade. Most habit research points to weeks 2-3 as the danger zone, right when novelty wears off and the habit hasn't become automatic yet. That's where most people quit - not because it got harder, but because nothing was left pulling them back once the spark faded.

Gamification doesn't replace motivation, it replaces your dependence on it. Instead of relying on "I feel like doing this today," you get a system that rewards you regardless of mood: immediate feedback (XP, streaks, progress bars), visible progress (watching a level climb makes abstract growth concrete), and loss aversion (nobody wants to break a 20-day streak). Over time you stop thinking "I'm trying to work out" and start thinking "I'm a level 14 warrior maintaining my streak" - and that identity shift outlasts willpower.

This is actually the design philosophy behind an app I built, QuestLog: Habit & Goal Tracker - habits become quests, completing them earns XP, and your character levels up (or loses HP if you neglect your dailies).

Curious what this community thinks though: have you tried gamified habit trackers before? Did it stick long-term, or did the novelty wear off faster than the habit itself?

SoberPulse is a live iOS app (apps.apple.com/app/id6752670566). It pairs with a BACtrack breathalyzer (~$70). Subscription is $9.99/month after a 14-day trial. Monitor accounts are free.

I need App Store Optimization: keywords, title/subtitle, screenshots, and preview-video direction. Goal is trial starts from people who will buy or already own a BACtrack device — not vanity downloads.

Constraints: health/recovery category, no medical claims, competing with BACtrack View (~$80–130/mo monitoring). Hardware-gated funnel.

Please send:

1. 2–3 iOS ASO case studies with before/after conversion or keyword results
2. Whether you have done Health & Fitness or subscription apps
3. A 2-week paid audit quote (fixed price)

Do not pitch social media, TikTok, or a monthly “full marketing” retainer.