The illusion of doing ASO right
There's a version of ASO work that looks fine from the outside. Keywords are indexed, screenshots exist, the app is live, and whoever is responsible for it can point to a ranked keyword chart and call it a day. But a lot of teams are running on assumptions that don't hold up when you look at them, and the gap between doing ASO adequately and doing it well is bigger than most people realize.
With over 5 million apps competing across the App Store and Google Play, simply building a great product is no longer enough. Most competitors use minimal ASO—which creates real opportunity for teams that invest in the right strategies. But that investment requires understanding where the discipline actually stands in 2026, not where it was two years ago.
Blaming the algorithm instead of diagnosing the problem
When downloads drop, the first place a lot of teams look is the algorithm. What else could it be? Something changed; the store is behaving differently, and there's nothing to be done about it. And yes, sometimes that's what happened. The App Store algorithm changed twice last year, and when it does change, it can affect performance in real ways.
But most of the time that's not what's going on, and using it as the default explanation means nobody goes looking for the real cause. The algorithm is a convenient thing to point at because it's external and invisible, and there's no follow-up action required.
The more useful response to a drop is to treat it like a diagnostic problem. Start with traffic sources. Did something change in search, browse, paid, or collections? Then look at the category more broadly. A competitor might have started bidding harder on a wiki:keyword-ranking you rely on. A new app might have appeared and started pulling users who would have found yours. One of your competitors might have changed its category entirely, which can affect how the store treats nearby apps.
Split the data by country, by traffic source, by channel, and figure out where the drop is coming from before drawing any conclusions. If browse traffic fell, maybe you lost a placement somewhere, and that's most of the story. If conversion dropped, that's a different kind of problem and needs a different response. Pointing at the algorithm and leaving it there doesn't change anything.
Custom Product Pages have fundamentally changed organic strategy
One of the most significant shifts in 2025 was Apple's introduction of keyword linking for wiki:custom-product-pages-cpp. Until July 2025, CPPs worked only for paid campaigns. After the update, they began appearing in organic search results—users searching for specific keywords now land on CPPs tailored to those queries, not the default listing.
This changes the role of CPPs from a paid-traffic tool to a core part of organic strategy. A fitness app can show running-focused screenshots for "run tracker" queries and strength-training visuals for "workout log" searches. Different users, different queries, different pages—all within organic search.
Apple expanded the CPP limit from 35 to 70 per app, opening more room for segmentation and testing. But several questions remain: how Apple handles keyword overlaps between CPPs, whether keyword combinations work or only single terms, and how CPPs compete with the default listing on shared queries. Teams that treat CPPs as an extension of their paid strategy are missing half the opportunity.
Google's shift to retention-based ranking
Google made engagement central to its 2025 strategy. The platform introduced Collections on the Android home screen, a personalized "You" tab for re-engagement, and expanded the Engage SDK across Play Store placements. The Level Up program for games now rewards apps that hit engagement benchmarks with additional store visibility.
This reflects a broader platform trend visible in Apple's own data: redownloads now outpace new downloads by more than 2:1—1.9 billion weekly redownloads versus 839 million new installs. Platforms are prioritizing apps that keep users, not just apps that acquire them.
Practically, this means acquisition and wiki:retention-rate can no longer be optimized separately. In-app events on iOS and promotional content on Google Play simultaneously attract new users and re-engage lapsed ones. Organic visibility and user retention now influence each other directly—if users leave quickly, the algorithm notices.
The expanding role of foldable devices in ASO strategy
Apple's entry into the foldable market in 2026 is projected to capture 46% of North American foldable market share in its first year. Samsung is expected to drop from 51% to 29%, Motorola from 44% to 23%, and Google Pixel from 5% to 3%. That restructuring will force every Android competitor to accelerate product refreshes and reconsider how their apps present on foldable displays.
For ASO practitioners, this means visual assets must now account for larger, more varied screen formats. Screenshot specifications, app preview video orientation, and app icon design all require testing across form factors that didn't meaningfully exist in volume a year ago. Apps optimized for single-screen layouts will face conversion penalties on foldable devices if they don't adapt visual presentation to the format.
Keyword volume matters less than relevance and intent
Ranking for more keywords is easy to show and hard to justify. A growing list of ranked terms, broader coverage across the category, positions improving over time—it's a satisfying chart to present. The problem is that none of it tells you whether any of it is working in a meaningful sense. If the keywords have low traffic and conversion through them is thin, the number is just a number.
Relevance is what determines whether a keyword is worth having. On iOS, character limits force some discipline. On Google Play, there's more room, and that flexibility can make the problem worse. When you can add more, the temptation is to add more, and the result is sometimes a long list of terms that look like coverage but aren't doing anything.
A more grounded way to track keyword research performance is to look at impressions alongside installs and conversion rate. When you change a keyword set, impressions should go up. Conversion shouldn't fall at the same time. If both things are moving in the right direction, the change was probably worth making. If impressions go up and conversion drops, something is off.
Creative testing requires clear hypotheses, not volume
Running screenshot tests without a clear idea of what you're testing is common, particularly on teams newer to ASO. You update the icon, try a different color, follow some design trend you saw in a competitor's store page, and then see what the numbers do. If they go up, great. If they don't, you try something else.
The issue is that without a defined hypothesis, you can't really learn anything from the result either way. You end up with a history of tests but no accumulated understanding of what your users respond to or why. Before running a test, it's worth knowing what specifically you're trying to find out, what a good result looks like, and what you'd do with a negative result.
It's also reasonable to be skeptical of what the platform tells you when a test concludes. Results from App Store and Play Store aren't perfectly reliable, and the confidence levels the platforms show are there for a reason. A result that looks positive in a 50/50 test can behave differently once the change goes live to everyone. Checking performance with two weeks of real data after rollout gives a more honest picture.
One simple thing worth trying when evaluating screenshot: convert them to black and white and see where your eye lands. When there's too much competing for attention, the black and white version tends to make that obvious. Effective store creative usually focuses on one or two things clearly. Screenshots that try to communicate everything at once often communicate nothing particularly well.
Promotional content as a scalable, low-effort acquisition channel
Viber's case demonstrates how promotional content on Google Play can become a repeatable, structured acquisition channel rather than a one-off tactic. By building a continuous event pipeline—combining new concepts with relaunches—the team drove over 330,000 incremental organic downloads with minimal production effort.
The second event in the series was a complete copy of the first—same visual, same text, no changes—and delivered 3× more downloads than the original. This result showed that timing and consistent presence often matter more than creating something new. Duplication, when orchestrated correctly, can itself be a growth tactic.
The broader lesson: scalable growth doesn't always require new assets. It often requires better orchestration. Promotional content is lightweight—one visual, short copy, minimal approval cycles—but when systematized, it unlocks incremental demand without increasing production overhead.
ASO is not a project with an end date
A lot of apps get a reasonable amount of ASO work done around launch, and then it sits mostly untouched until there's a major release or something goes wrong. The metadata stays the same, screenshots age out, keyword performance drifts without anyone noticing. The app is still there and still ranking for something, but the gap between where it is and where it could be tends to grow quietly.
If you're not running tests and updating things, someone else in your category probably is. If they find something that improves conversion or ranking, they move up. Positions in the store aren't permanent, and they don't default to whoever got there first.
Promo content and in-app events are a part of this that tends to get less attention than keywords and screenshots, but they matter—especially on Google Play, where promotional content has become more important for browse and explore traffic over the past couple of years. These things need regular attention, and the way they perform across different regions and languages is worth tracking over time.
Keywords probably need revisiting at least quarterly to check whether something has shifted. Screenshots and other creative elements can be tested more frequently. The cycle doesn't have to be intense, but there should be a cycle. The teams that treat ASO as something that runs continuously tend to be in a better position than the ones that treat it as a project with an end date.
The word "optimization" is sitting right there in the name.