iOS 8 First Impressions From The ASO Perspective

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App Store Optimization (ASO)

6 min readOct 23, 2014

This article was originally published on the WordData blog.

The iOS 8 is still new. The operational system is finding its way towards iDevices, but in a slower pace than iOS 7. Fiksu has a live iOS 8 and iPhone 6 adoption rate page, which points out that so far, iOS 8 is responsible for just 34% of events. The iOS 7, on the other hand, at the same time after launch, had more than 50%.

For developers, the anxiety is related to the several changes in the App Store. They want to know how their business is going to be affected. Are they going to get more downloads with Discovery? Or was the update a waste of time?

Since I’ve been working with app marketing for some time now, I decided to write my first impressions of the OS. I’ll be focusing on App Store Optimization, especially the Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO).

Scrolling Results

Finally, Apple. I couldn’t take those cards anymore. The smooth and fast scrolling will help apps after the 10th position in the search results to get some exposure. It’s pretty easy and fast to scroll, and the new layout brought some new interesting ways to optimize your app.

Screenshots

Thanks to the endless vertical scrolling, apps are now stacked…vertically. On the iPhone, iOS 7 had a fixed length for the horizontal scroll. This doesn’t happen in iOS 8 for its vertical scroll, which means that in the iPhone, some apps occupy a bigger area than others in the search results.

Apps with double portrait screenshots have more visibility than those with a horizontal screenshot. The area they are allocated with is significantly bigger. If you want to take advantage of this, remember to make the first two screenshots portraits, otherwise the App Store will show just the first screenshot.

Another great way to use double portraits in your favor is by making them connect with each other, giving the impression of a single large screenshot (bigger than a single landscape).

On the iPad, as with iOS 7, apps have equal areas to show themselves. A curious twist though is that using two portrait screenshots for that device will result in a smaller area for your marketing assets. The single landscape is taller and has the same width as the double screenshots.

Editor’s Choice and Essentials Badges

These badges are not huge, nor are they gold and shiny, but these will be noticed by users if they’re not scrolling too fast. In my experience browsing and showing iOS 8 to other people, apps with these badges brought a little more attention to them as usual, as users got curious why Apple recommended them.

Explore

This page offers a nice way to brave the App Store jungle. For us, it’s another place to try to be ranked on. Subcategories seem to have a connection with keywords, but they’re not as simple as a shortcut to “category + subcategory” searches. The algorithm is a bit more complex, and looks more similar to related keywords.

For instance, I’ve seen a sniper game app ranking first for the Games > Action > Fighter > Bullets category. It used the keyword “topgun.”

App Previews

These videos are one of the most discussed things in the iOS development world today. Apple is even promoting apps with App Previews on the App Store Featured page.

As with the Editor’s Choice Badge, the videos made users stop and look at the app more closely, so I believe they will have a nice, positive impact on conversion rate.

On the iPhone, it might be a good idea to make the video a portrait. That way, you can display the video poster frame and the first screenshot.

App Bundles

The bundles appear in the search results pages, sometimes right below the apps included on them. This increases the area the app occupies on the results page, since there’s a massive block of scrolling with stuff related to your app only.

The app icons and screenshot order are the same. When creating the bundles, then, pay attention to the order of the apps, putting the ones with gorgeous marketing assets first to increase conversion.

Apparently, the first app determines category. Both bundles, with apps from different categories, featured by Apple had their category matching the first app. It could be determined by the majority, though. If you work with apps from several categories, pay attention to this detail and experiment until you have the bundle in the desired category.

Fun fact: App Bundles don’t contain “bundle” as a keyword. If your app is on Games > Action, for example, it will appear as a result for searches with “games” and “action.” However, this doesn’t happen with bundles. If you’re planning to make a bundle, I strongly recommend placing “Bundle” somewhere in your title. I couldn’t find Square Enix’s Final Fantasy Collection because of that.

What about keywords? Well, it’s not clear yet how bundles work. Theoretically, they should import all keywords from all the apps it contains. I searched for keywords from the names of apps included in bundles and their bundles didn’t appear in the search results. Bundles don’t work then as a magic keyword multiplication miracle.

Conclusion

Even for someone working with ASO for some time, everything is still so new that we need more time to figure out more of the black box. If you’re an app developer, proceed with caution, especially if making an App Bundle.

Keep tuned to the blog to find out more about the iOS 8 App Store Optimization!

Have you found any anomalies or weird behavior with the App Store’s new features?

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Learn more about App Store Optimization (ASO) on the WordData blog.

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