My New iOS App Strategy

It’s been a while. No earnings updates or any other updates for months. I’ve been keeping things updated on X, but I’ve not sat down to write a blog post in so long. Why? To put it simply, I’ve been so fully focussed on making apps and developing my app business that I’ve neglected the long form content that blogging provides. I actually really enjoy writing when I get going, but it’s the getting going that I struggle with as it just doesn’t excite me in the same way as opening Xcode does.

Anyway, things have changed a LOT since last time. Some successes, a lot of failures, but all learnings.

ASO 🏆

I adopted a new ASO strategy after watching an Adam Lyttle video, and it’s been my three step process ever since. I always had the first two steps, like most people, but I now go a little further. Here are my three (ok maybe four) criteria for ASO. This is keyword research done BEFORE starting to work on an app. What comes after is also below:

1. Main keyword has to have medium to high traffic

2. Main keyword has to have medium to low competition

3. Main keyword should not appear in any competitor app titles in the top 10 search results

4. The above is all done based on the US market. The US is third in terms of overall downloads behind China and India and second only to China in consumer spend on mobile (2024). I find it easier to develop for US than I do for India and China as I am UK based and so context, nuance and language comes easier to me here.

These are my new commandments and so far they are steering me well. Does it mean that everything I build is now successful? Nope! Not by a long shot.

But the above means I will spend time building an app that has a chance, with the main keyword in the title. How much time I spend on developing the app further and trying to make it win before moving onto another small bet depends on some other criteria.

OK, we’ve built an app, now what? 📱

Well, here comes my next phase that my apps have to pass through in order to be a success, or at least something I will spend more time focusing on improving and advertising.

So what’s this phase?

The good old Apple push! 

This is the period of time when you have released an app and you see a sudden tidal wave of impressions and downloads. This usually happens about one or two days after you release, and it’s a fantastic indicator of how well an app will do.

Keyword research tools are great, but this phase will tell you for sure if something is getting searched for. It seems that Apple will make your app appear in the instant search results as people are typing their query on the App Store, this is how they boost it. If your app is relevant to what people are looking for, bingo, you get a ton of downloads. But so what? This only lasts a week or two right?

Correct, but it’s an indicator and information we didn’t have before we released. When I released my Spider Identifier AI app, the Apple push did nothing. It showed me that even when this was showing up prominently, it wasn’t getting downloads or conversions. My keyword title passed all of the first criteria, but when it came down to brass tax, it just didn’t hold up. Since then, it gets a few downloads per week, but nothing special. I have advertised the app a few times to validate my findings, and still nothing. It’s a dead app. I won’t delete it, as it will bring in a few dollars here and there, but it’s not changing my life.

However, when I released my Life In The UK app earlier this year, the Apple push kicked in and I made over $100 for three days running from that app. This was a positive signal. If I can get this in front of people after the push ends, it will get downloads. And this was true, it’s still making money now. It makes nothing compare to my larger apps, but it was still worth taking on further.

It made it to phase 3.

Development and Advertising 📊

So from here on out, we have an app that has a good keyword, that we validated has space for us to make it to the top 10 fairly easily. We then saw that people are legitimately searching for and downloading the app when it’s visible to people.

So now we have to make it visible permanently.

My method for this is twofold:

1. Add new features and changes to the app to make it more useful and better than any competition. This also signals to Apple that it’s in active development, which helps your ranking.

2. Advertise the app using Apple Ads and target specifically USA traffic for my target title keyword, and only that keyword. What a user searches for before downloading your app is important, so this step cannot be missed. I have gone from 50+ in the rankings to top 3 using this method.

So now we have an app that has a keyword we validated, that people are actively searching for, that is downloaded when people find it, and now shows up in search results.

Is it that simple? 🤷

In truth, no. With all the best research in the world, sometimes apps just fail. Getting an app that does well in the Apple push is also not as easy as it sounds, most of my apps don’t do well in this period.

But in a world full of ASO mystery, this at least gives me a process to try make sense of what’s going on and direct my business decisions and development.

(image: Astro screenshot from one of my most successful apps after following my new strategy)

Earnings updates 💰

I haven’t posted an app earnings update for a while, but here is my year so far (October is in progress and, using the average, is on track for $5000+)

As you can see, the year is going very well with my earnings mostly increasing each month. There have been a few factors for my growth. I’ve paid attention a lot on X to find trends, particularly in AI. I also came across this video, again from Adam Lyttle, that provided quick and easy code for generating AI wrapper apps. One of these AI wrapper apps became my highest earning app, bringing in 99% of my income each month.

That’s been amazing, but it’s also terrifying as I know these apps have a shelf life and, more generally, having all income from one app is a high risk situation. I’m not reliant on this income as I work full time as a Software Engineer, but it’s still a risk.

What’s next 🔮

My goal is to achieve $5000 per month consistently for the next three months. This will see me over what should be a bad season for my app.

My main objective now is to get another app, completely different from this one, to $1000+ per month. This will at least give me some peace of mind that if my main app fails, I have others that will pick up the pieces to some degree.

I will also make more time to write here on this blog, so make sure to subscribe for more insights and info.

Good luck out there 🚀