First reported in Lukas Stefanko’s tweet and shared in the ASO Stack Slack by member Thomas Petit, a new Black Hat ASO practice seems to have emerged on Google Play. As seen in the example below, an Android developer released an app with a 1-star average rating, but the icon actually displays 4.5 stars. This is a move to make users believe that the app receives higher ratings than it actually does. What’s more, according to Lukas, these users are tricked into activating a 3-day trial and, if they forget to cancel it afterwards, they have to pay €49.99/week.

The ASO Stack is the Slack workspace for ASO practitioners to discuss and share industry news, knowledge and much more. We left 2018 with a bang, welcoming our 1000th member to this wonderful community in November & we’re excited to grow even more in 2019!

We started the new year with a big announcement: The first ever App Store Optimization Conference will arrive in 2019! This is the first conference series entirely dedicated to ASO, and will be held in Berlin (May 22) and New York (date TBD). More info will be available here: https://www.asoconference.com

This update was prepared by Binh Dang, an ASO consultant at Phiture. He helps companies with optimizing their apps for both the App Store and Play Store through ASO experimentation & keyword optimization processes.

The Advanced ASO Book has finally arrived in color paperback with updates on various topics, including Apple Search Ads, Google UAC, ASO tools, and Apple app previews. Since its initial release in 2017 in digital form, the ASO book (then e-book) has been named one of the “best resources” for ASO efforts.