App Store Optimization (ASO)
Tuning your app's title, keywords, and creatives so the store's own search puts you in front of people who never heard of you.
See it
What it is
ASO is search work aimed at two search boxes: the App Store's and Google Play's. The inputs are narrower than the web. What both stores openly index is metadata: your title, subtitle, the hidden keyword field on iOS, the description text on Play. Everything past that is unpublished. Download velocity, retention, and star ratings are widely believed to feed ranking because user behavior usually does, but neither company publishes weights, and 'a better listing conversion rate lifts your rank' is a practitioner hypothesis rather than a documented rule. Creatives (icon, screenshots, preview video) are worth the work either way, because they decide whether an impression becomes an install, which is the number you actually bank.
Do it before launch, not after. The words you ship with set your ceiling, and reindexing takes days. Pick 3 to 5 phrases a real person would type ('habit tracker', 'receipt scanner') instead of fighting 'fitness'. Then watch impressions, product page views, and install conversion as separate numbers, because a ranking win behind a bad icon changes nothing.
Gotcha: the two stores index differently, so copy-pasting one listing into the other burns slots. iOS reads a 100-character comma-separated keyword field and ignores your description for search. Play has no keyword field at all and indexes the long description. Stuffing keywords into the title gets the listing rejected on both.
Ask AI for it
Run an App Store Optimization pass for my app, described here: [paste description]. Work from these inputs: target market and language [paste], the three competitor listings I care about [paste], and my keyword volume and competition data [paste export]. Return four things. (1) An iOS app name of 30 characters or fewer and a subtitle of 30 or fewer, both readable, not keyword lists. (2) A 100-character comma-separated iOS keyword field with no spaces after commas, no plurals of words already present, and no word repeated from the title or subtitle. (3) A Google Play short description (80 characters) and long description (up to 4000) written as natural copy, using each target keyword only where it genuinely fits, with no target repetition count and no keyword density rule. (4) The 5 target search phrases, ranked using the volume and competition data I gave you, citing the row you used for each. Any phrase you cannot support from that data, label explicitly as a hypothesis to be tested rather than a recommendation. Do not use competitor brand names and do not stuff the title.