It’s an exciting month here at Phiture as we welcome our 100th hire and celebrate this incredible milestone. It’s remarkable to see how far we’ve come and is an amazing achievement for everyone at the company.

According to Apple, 65% of downloads occur directly after a search on the App Store (2018). This is much higher than on the Google Play Store where browse installs dominate. The large share of search installs on the App Store means that enhancing an app’s placement in search is essential for visibility when visitors to the store search for an app.

Google has released new organic search data on the Google Play Console. First announced as an #ASO earthquake by mobile growth expert and ASO Stack Slack member Thomas Petit on Twitter in October 2017, doubted by many in the community, however, now confirmed through different sources. The data has become available for selected beta-testers in the User Acquisition section of the Google Play Console.

Competitor analysis can really drive your ASO strategy. Phiture has identified specific areas where you can focus for impact with your ASO along with tactics around how you can research best practices and tricks from your competitors. Due to strong interest from the app community Phiture decided to release the slides from the exclusive workshop at App Promotion Summit Berlin.

In just 7 seconds, a store listing visitor decides whether to download an app. This makes the feature graphic along with the app icon the most important visual ASO asset on the Google Play Store. The feature graphic acts as an Android promotional banner to grab the visitor’s attention, being the first thing that visitors see when visiting the store site. Especially as compared to the App Store, the large majority of users downloading an app on Google Play visit the store page.

Thomas Petit was, as always, first to report on the ASO Stack Slack group that Apple would release Search Ads in Mexico (Spanish), Canada (French & English) and Switzerland (French, German & Italian). Search Ads went live in these countries on October 17. The selection of countries probably relates to Apple wanting to tackle the Latin American market with Spanish (with Spanish also being important in the US), as well as tackling French in Canada.

Google has announced that developers focusing on app quality will rank higher in the search. An internal analysis found that half of 1-star reviews in the Play Store mentioned the issue of app stability. Google has recently been focusing on improving overall app quality in the Play Store. In particular, Google wants developers to use the Android vitals function in the Play Console to find and fix app quality issues.

Apple introduced category cards in the beta of the “All-New App Store” end of June with some placeholder images. End of July it seems to move more to what the developer cards also look like: a grid with app icon tiles, which will likely include the top apps of the category.

Having a strong title, keyword-set and description is central to the discovery of an app in the Apple App and Google Play stores. In particular, as 65% of installs in the App Store come from search, with around half of those coming in via a broad search, thus “listen to books” rather than “audible”. Being smart about an app’s metadata can therefore result in significant organic uplift.

Great news: source types are now available with App Analytics on iTunes Connect. App Store Sources provide insight on where users discover an app which includes both App Store Browse and App Store Search data. If you want to increase your visibility by for example getting featured, App Store Browse data will help you address the success and tells you whether customers discovered an app via the Featured, Categories or Top Charts sections in the App Store.