How to Get App Downloads: Where They Come From and What Moves Each Source

To get app downloads, find out which source each download comes from and work on the largest one first. On the App Store that is search: Apple's advertising site says almost 65% of downloads happen directly after a search. The remainder comes from browsing the store, from links tapped in other apps, from links on websites and from ads. Each source has its own lever, its own cost and its own number in App Store Connect.

This guide is organized around those numbers. It starts with Apple's own source types and the share figures that have been published, then goes source by source: what moves it, what it costs, how fast it works and how to measure it. After that come three stages (the first 100, 1,000 and 10,000 downloads), a table for diagnosing an app that gets no downloads, and the benchmarks worth comparing yourself with. Every figure was opened and checked against its source in October 2026.

Two other guides cover the neighboring ground. How to market an app is the full plan from positioning to retention, and how to promote an app for free ranks 14 tactics that cost no money. This one answers a narrower question: where the next download will come from and how you can tell.

Where app downloads come from: Apple's source types

Apple sorts every download into a source type. You see them in App Store Connect: open the app, click the Analytics tab and choose Sources under Acquisition. The definitions below are paraphrased from Apple's acquisition help page, and the last column is our note on what you can do about each one.

Three details on that page change how you read the numbers. The source is recorded when someone taps to download or redownload, and every later sale and session is credited to that source, so you can compare the quality of each one and its volume. A manual redownload resets the source. And for an iOS app, a tap on a website opened in Chrome or another browser that is not Safari is credited to that browser under app referrers, so part of your web traffic sits in the app referrer row.

Campaigns sit on top of the source types. Apple describes campaign links as part of the referral workflow: a link that carries its campaign tokens still arrives through an app or a website, and App Analytics also files it under the campaign name you chose. That is how you separate one newsletter from another when both arrive as web referrers.

What share of downloads comes from each source

Apple has published two share figures and both are about search. Its advertising site says 70% of App Store visitors use search to discover apps and almost 65% of downloads happen directly after a search. The footnote on that page reads App Store, worldwide, 2022, so the figures are Apple's own and four years old.

The only public breakdown of all four main sources comes from Sensor Tower, and it is older still. Sensor Tower's download sources report estimated that in 2020 search brought 59% of worldwide App Store downloads, app referrals 20% and browse 12%. Those three add up to 91%, which leaves about 9% for the fourth source it tracked, web referrals. These are a research firm's estimates for a pandemic year, so treat them as proportions and not as targets.

One newer figure points the same way. Apple's 2025 App Store Transparency Report counts 892,670,823 average weekly visitors and 463,575,966 customer accounts searching the store in an average week. Visitors and accounts are different units, so the ratio is rough, but it comes to about 52% of weekly visitors running at least one search.

Your own split matters more than any of these. A new app with no ranking yet often gets most of its first downloads from referrers, because the founder is sending every one of them by hand. An app that has been live for a year and ranks for a few phrases usually looks like the Apple figure. Check the Sources page before you decide where to spend a week. If your question is how to get more downloads on the App Store itself, with no outside traffic, the next four sections on search, the product page, ratings and featuring are the answer.

How to get more app downloads from each source: a summary table

The table lists each lever, the source it feeds, what it costs and how to measure it. Speed and cost are our estimates for a small team. The rules and limits behind each row are sourced in the sections that follow.

App Store search: the largest source of downloads

Search is where most downloads start, and it is the one source that keeps working while you sleep. Apple's App Store search guidance says results depend on text relevance, meaning matches for your title, subtitle, keywords and primary category, and on user behavior such as downloads, ratings and reviews. The second half of that sentence explains why everything else in this guide also helps search: each download from a post or a pitch is a signal that lifts your ranking.

The competition for those results is concentrated. The transparency report counts 2,172,472 apps on the App Store, and in an average week of 2025 only 164,436 of them appeared in the top 10 results of at least 1,000 searches. That is about 7.6% of the catalog. Over the whole year 1,365,649 apps managed it at least once, about 63%. A new app is far more likely to reach the first screen for a specific phrase than for a broad one, and Apple's guidance says the same: popular terms bring traffic and are highly competitive for a newer or smaller app, while less common terms bring less traffic with less competition.

1. Put the strongest phrase in the app name and the second in the subtitle. Both hold 30 characters.
2. Fill the keyword field, which holds 100 characters separated by commas with no spaces. Leave out words already in the name, subtitle or category, plurals of words you included, and the words app and game.
3. Pick the primary category with care. Apple indexes the primary and the optional secondary category for search.
4. Keep search phrases out of the promotional text. Apple states that this field does not affect ranking.
5. Read the result in App Analytics after two weeks: impressions and downloads filtered to App Store search, per territory.

Remember that the search row includes your ads. If you run Apple Ads in search results, subtract those installs before you credit your keywords. The complete method, from keyword research to localization, is in our guide to App Store Optimization, and the App Store character counter checks each field against its limit.

Product page conversion rate: turn impressions into downloads

Every source ends at the same place: a person looking at your icon, name, rating and screenshots. Conversion rate measures how often that look becomes a download. Apple's metric definitions describe it as total downloads and pre orders divided by unique device impressions, where an impression is a view of the app on the Today, Games, Apps or Search tabs lasting more than one second.

That definition has a consequence people miss. On the App Store someone can tap Get in the search results without ever opening your product page, so the parts of the listing visible in results do much of the selling. The search guidance says your rating and up to three screenshots or app previews may show there, depending on the platform and the orientation of the images.

• The first three screenshots. Apple's product page guidance allows up to 10, and depending on orientation the first one to three appear in search results when there is no app preview. Give each a caption that states one benefit.
• The app preview. Up to three previews of up to 30 seconds each, which autoplay with the sound off. The first seconds have to make sense muted.
• The promotional text. It holds 170 characters at the top of the description and can be changed at any time with no new version, so use it for news.
• A test. Product page optimization compares up to three alternative versions of your icon, screenshots or previews against the original. You can run one test at a time for up to 90 days and read the result in App Analytics.
• A page per audience. Custom product pages let you publish up to 70 extra versions of the page, each with its own link, screenshots and promotional text, and you can assign keywords so a custom page appears in search for those terms.
• A search result asset. On iOS 27 and iPadOS 27, Apple lets you replace the default screenshots in search results with an image or video of your choice, and add a header to the product page. The specifications and rules are in the creative assets section of our App Store Optimization guide.

Change one element at a time and give each change two weeks, or you will not know which one moved the number. Image dimensions are in our App Store screenshot sizes reference, and the screenshot size checker tells you whether a file will be accepted before you upload it.

What is a good App Store conversion rate

There are three different ratios in circulation and all three get called conversion rate. Apple divides downloads by impressions. Most App Store Optimization tools divide downloads by product page views, which gives a much higher number, and they call Apple's version the install rate. Ad platforms divide downloads by taps on an ad. Before you compare yourself with a benchmark, check which one it is. Our App Store conversion rate benchmarks lay the published averages out by category and say which ratio each one uses.

The AppTweak rows come from AppTweak's conversion rate benchmarks by category, published in May 2026 and updated that August. AppTweak sells App Store Optimization software and the figures are its own estimates. The spread between categories is the useful part: a number that is poor for a food delivery app can be excellent for a game.

The fairest comparison is the one inside your own account. Peer group benchmarks in App Store Connect place your conversion rate against the 25th, 50th and 75th percentile of apps with the same category, business model and download volume. Apple calls them directional, and they still use the same definition as the rest of your dashboard, which no outside benchmark does.

To see what a point of conversion is worth, run the arithmetic on 10,000 unique impressions. At 1.6%, the average Apple cites for default product pages, that is 160 downloads. At AppTweak's 3.8% it is 380. Moving from the first to the second more than doubles downloads with no extra traffic, which is why the page comes before any channel that sends people to it.

Ratings and reviews: the number next to your name in search

Your rating appears on the product page and in search results, and Apple's ratings and reviews page says ratings and reviews improve discoverability and encourage downloads. The search guidance adds that they can influence how the app ranks. A rating therefore works twice: it helps decide whether you are shown and whether you are chosen.

• Ask with Apple's prompt. It can appear up to three times in a 365 day period, so place it right after a user finishes something and never on first launch.
• Reply to reviews. The reviewer is notified and can update the review. Apple suggests starting with the lowest ratings and with reviews that mention a technical problem in the current version.
• Close the loop after a fix. Apple recommends naming the fix in your release notes and replying to the older reviews that raised it.
• Think twice before resetting. The summary rating can be reset with a new version, and Apple recommends doing so sparingly because having few ratings may discourage people from downloading.
• Watch each country. The summary rating is specific to each territory, so a strong rating in the US does nothing for a visitor in Germany.

Written reviews have gained weight. Apple now shows a review summary on product pages, generated with large language models from individual reviews and refreshed regularly. As of October 2026 the feature is live in the United States and, in English, in Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, New Zealand, Singapore, South Africa and the United Kingdom. A visitor in those storefronts reads one paragraph about your app before any single review.

Where to place the prompt, what to say in replies and how to recover a low rating are covered in how to get App Store reviews.

Getting featured by Apple: the App Store browse source

Browse is the row that moves when Apple's editors pick you. Apple's featuring page lists the places an app can appear: stories and collections on the Today, Games and Apps tabs, App of the Day and Game of the Day, in app event cards, pre order placements and the Editors' Choice badge. Featured selections are localized and curated by region, so a feature can run in one country and not in the next.

You ask through a form called Featuring Nominations in App Store Connect. Apple's nomination help page lists what it asks for, and you need the Account Holder, Admin, App Manager or Marketing role to send one.

On timing the two Apple pages differ slightly. The featuring page asks for a minimum of two weeks of notice and recommends up to three months for wider consideration, and the help page says three weeks. Send the nomination at least three weeks ahead and you satisfy both.

Apple says there is no checklist. Its editors consider user experience, interface design, innovation, uniqueness, accessibility, localization and the product page itself, including screenshots, previews, descriptions and positive ratings and reviews. If you are picked for certain Today tab placements you get a notification in the App Store Connect app, along with ready made assets to share on social media.

Apple publishes no acceptance rate, and we will not guess one. Treat featuring as a low cost lottery ticket: send a nomination for every launch and every major update, attach an in app event when the update fits one, and plan as if nothing will come of it.

Web referrer downloads: your website, Smart App Banners and campaign links

Web referrer is the source you fully own. It counts every tap on a link to your product page from a website opened in Safari, and the Sources page lists the referring sites by name, so you can see whether a download came from your own domain, a newsletter archive or a blog post about you.

A Smart App Banner on every page of your site

A Smart App Banner is the strip Safari shows at the top of a web page with your icon and a button. Apple's Smart App Banner documentation describes how it behaves: a tap opens the App Store when the app is not installed, and opens the app itself when it is. Safari hides the banner if the device cannot run the app or the app is not available in the visitor's country, and it does not come back on a page after the visitor closes it.

1. Find your app ID. Apple's documentation sends you to its marketing tools, where the number is listed as Apple ID. It is the same number that follows the letters id in your App Store link.
2. Add Apple's meta tag to the head of each page where the banner should appear. The exact tag is on the documentation page linked above, and it takes the app ID as its one required value.
3. Add the optional app argument, a URL of your choosing, if a page should open a matching screen in the app. Apple passes that value to the app when the banner is tapped.
4. Add your campaign and provider tokens, so banner downloads show up as their own campaign. Apple's campaign link page confirms the banner accepts both.
5. Test on a real iPhone. Apple notes that banners do not appear in the simulator and cannot be shown inside a frame.

Campaign links for everything else

A campaign link is your normal App Store link with two tokens added. Apple's campaign link help page explains them: the provider token identifies your developer account and stays the same on every link, and the campaign token is the name you give one campaign. App Analytics then reports impressions, product page views, downloads, usage and sales for that name.

Make one link per place a person can tap: the button on your site, each social profile, each newsletter, each launch post. Our App Store campaign link generator builds the link from your app ID and tokens and keeps the name inside the limit.

Two more tools from Apple's app promotion page belong on a website. Apple's marketing tools generate short links, QR codes and App Store badges for your product page, and custom product pages give each audience its own address. The badge has usage rules of its own, which our App Store marketing guidelines page summarizes.

Social media downloads: the app referrer source

A tap on your link inside Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn or any other app is an app referrer, and the Sources page names the app it came from. Social media is usually a small row at first. It grows slowly, it is the place people check to see whether an app is still maintained, and unlike a launch spike it does not end.

• Put a campaign link in every profile, one campaign per network. That is the only way to tell Instagram from TikTok when someone copies the link into a browser.
• Post on a schedule you can keep. Buffer's consistent posting study (January 2025, more than 100,000 Buffer users over 26 weeks) found the most consistent posters got about five times the engagement per post of inconsistent ones.
• Post what is true this week: a new version, a rating, a review you have permission to quote, a milestone, a feature tip. Apple's ratings and reviews page allows your rating in marketing when it reflects the current rating, and a customer review only with the reviewer's permission.
• Go where your users already are. In Pew Research Center's 2025 survey half of US adults said they use Instagram, 37% TikTok and 26% Reddit. Worldwide numbers are in our social media statistics.
• Send some traffic to a custom product page whose screenshots match the post, so the page continues the story the post began.

Formats and schedules for each network are in how to promote an app on social media, with separate guides for TikTok and Instagram. For wording, see the app update announcement examples and the wider set of mobile app marketing examples.

Launch platforms: Product Hunt, Reddit and Hacker News

Launch platforms deliver a burst of visitors in a day or two and then go quiet. Each has rules that decide whether your post stays up, and the rules differ enough to check one by one.

The Product Hunt rows come from Product Hunt's launch preparation guide and its guide to sharing a launch, the Reddit row from the Reddit Rules and the Hacker News row from the Show HN guidelines.

Product Hunt has one detail that affects measurement. Its main link field does not accept shortened links or tracking links, so point it at your landing page and let the Smart App Banner and the button on that page carry the campaign tokens. The same guide reports that products launched on a weekend get 15% more clicks on the Visit button than weekday launches, which can suit a small team that will not win a weekday.

Plan the day before it arrives. The app launch checklist covers the tasks around a release, and the app launch announcement examples have wording for each platform.

Press, influencers, cross promotion and referral

Press and newsletters

Coverage arrives as a web referrer, and a small newsletter that matches your audience usually sends more downloads than a large site that does not. What a writer needs from you is a reason to care this week and a way to try the app. Apple's promotion page says you can give press and influencers early access with promo codes, up to 100 per version of the app on each platform. For an app that is not out yet, TestFlight lets you invite up to 10,000 external testers once your first build has passed review.

Keep one thing in mind when you count the result. A download made with a promo code is filed under Unavailable, so the writer's own install will not appear under the campaign you gave them. Their readers will.

Influencers and creators

A creator's video sends app referrer traffic from whichever network it runs on. Give each creator a campaign link of their own, or a custom product page whose screenshots show the feature they demonstrated, and you can compare creators by the downloads and the retention they brought, and stop judging them by views.

Paid or gifted, the relationship has to be disclosed. The FTC's guidance for social media influencers says to disclose any financial, employment, personal or family relationship with a brand, and that a free product counts. The disclosure goes in the post or the video itself, because a line on a profile page is likely to be missed, and plain words such as ad or sponsored are enough. Put that requirement in your brief, since the rule applies to you as well as to the creator.

Cross promotion

If you have a second app, its users are the cheapest audience you will ever reach. Apple's App Review Guidelines (section 3.2.1) allow you to display your own apps for promotion inside your app, provided the app is not merely a catalog of them. Section 3.2.2 rules out an interface that shows third party apps in a way similar to the App Store, so keep swaps with other developers in newsletters and social posts.

Apple's campaign link page describes how to measure this. When one app presents another app's product page with StoreKit, you can pass the campaign token and provider token as parameters, and App Analytics credits the downloads to that campaign. The promotion page also offers app bundles, which let customers buy up to 10 of your apps in a single purchase.

Referral programs

A referral program turns existing users into a source. For subscription apps Apple supplies the mechanism: its subscriptions page lists a member referral program among the uses of offer codes, where current subscribers share a code and receive a benefit, and it notes that you are responsible for delivering the reward. Offer codes come as single use codes or as a custom code you choose.

Three lines in the review guidelines set the boundaries. Section 3.2.2 says an app must not force users to rate it, review it or download other apps to reach a feature. Section 3.1.5 bars cryptocurrency apps from offering currency for tasks such as getting other people to download. And section 5.6.3 prohibits manipulating referrals to your app. A reward for a real friend who really installs is on the right side of all three. Measure the program with one campaign token for the whole program, since tokens name campaigns and not people.

Apple Ads: buying downloads from search

Apple Ads is the product many people still call Apple Search Ads. It places your app on the Today tab, on the Search tab, in search results and on other apps' product pages, and according to Apple's placement guide each ad is built from the metadata and images you already uploaded to App Store Connect. Search results ads are the natural first test, because the person has just typed what they want.

Apple publishes no price list, because there is none. Apple's help page on bids says you set a maximum cost per tap, you pay only when someone taps, and the amount you pay may be less than your maximum. The Apple Ads glossary adds that pricing follows second price auction principles and takes relevance, other advertisers' bids and a possible reserve price into account. What a tap costs you depends on who else wants the same search term.

The Basic and Advanced rows come from Apple's comparison of the two plans, and the credit and conversion figures from Apple's advertising site. Here is what the credit can buy, as an illustration only: at a $1.00 tap, 100 USD pays for 100 taps, and at Apple's 60% average that is about 60 downloads at roughly $1.67 each. Your own tap price and conversion will differ, and that difference is exactly what the first 100 USD is for.

Start with your own app name and five to ten specific phrases, and compare the people who arrive with your organic users after a week. Downloads from search results ads are counted in the App Store search row of App Analytics, so keep the Apple Ads dashboard open beside it. Paid channels beyond Apple, and how to tell whether an install earns back its cost, are covered in how to market an app.

Updates and redownloads: a reason to be seen again

The transparency report contains two ratios that should change how you treat a release. In an average week of 2025 the App Store recorded 929,754,061 app downloads and 2,053,461,208 redownloads, about 2.2 redownloads for every download. People who had an app before and come back are a larger flow than people arriving for the first time, and App Analytics counts them: total downloads is the sum of first time downloads and redownloads.

The second ratio is about who notices an update. Apple counted 46,630,867,840 automatic app updates a week against 701,572,983 manual ones. Roughly 1.5% of updates happen because someone tapped Update. The other 98.5% arrive in the background, with nobody opening the page where your release notes live, so a release that is announced only in the What's New text reaches very few of the people who have the app.

• Rewrite the promotional text on release day. It needs no review and sits at the top of your page for every new visitor.
• Create an in app event with the Major Update badge when the release adds something significant. Apple's in app events page says an event can last up to 31 days and be promoted up to 14 days before it starts, and events can appear in search results and on the Today, Games and Apps tabs.
• Send a featuring nomination of the App Enhancements type three weeks before a large release.
• Reply to the reviews that asked for what you just shipped. The reviewer gets a notification, which is a direct message to someone who may have deleted the app.
• Announce the update outside the store: a post on each network, an email to your list, a line on your site. This is the only version of the news that lapsed users will see.

Write the notes for a reader even if few people open them, because reviewers, journalists and the people comparing you with a competitor do. The app release notes generator drafts them from a list of changes, and the app update announcement examples show how the same news reads as a post.

How to get app downloads at each stage: the first 100, 1,000 and 10,000

The source that matters changes as the count grows. The stages below are our own framework for a small team with no ad budget to speak of. The thresholds inside them come from Apple's pages cited above.

The first 100 downloads

The first hundred are for learning, and almost all of them will come from links you sent yourself. Before any of that traffic arrives, make sure it can be counted. Apple shows download metrics once an app has at least five first time downloads, and the Campaigns section appears only after the app has analytics data, so create your campaign links on the second day and use them from then on.

Then watch three things: which link people came through, whether the people who viewed the page downloaded, and what the first users say. Fix the screenshot that everyone misreads. Ship the first update within two weeks. A hundred downloads and ten ratings teach you more about the listing than any benchmark.

How to get your first 1,000 app downloads

Between 100 and 1,000 you add sources one at a time and keep the ones that send people who stay. Run one launch on the platform that matches your audience. Send individual pitches. Start the weekly post. Rewrite the keyword field with the phrases that are already bringing impressions, which you can now see per territory.

This is also the stage to spend the Apple Ads credit. The point is to learn which search terms convert, since 60 or so downloads will not change your total. Any term that converts well as an ad is a term worth ranking for without one.

The first 10,000 downloads

Past 1,000 the store starts to do part of the work, because search ranking reflects downloads and ratings and you now have both. The gains come from conversion and reach: test the icon and the first screenshot, build a custom product page for each audience and assign keywords to it, add the language of the second largest territory in your impressions, and give returning users a reason to redownload with each release.

Peer group benchmarks become useful here, since Apple can narrow the comparison by download volume. If your conversion rate sits below the 25th percentile of your peer group, work on the page before you add another channel.

Why is my app not getting downloads? A diagnostic table

An app with no downloads has one of three problems: too few people see it, the people who see it do not look closer, or the people who look do not download. App Analytics shows which. Open Sources, then use the metric menu at the top to switch between unique impressions, product page views, total downloads and conversion rate, and read them for the last 30 days.

Read each row by source type before acting. A conversion rate that is healthy for search and poor for web referrers says the page is fine and the traffic you are sending is mismatched. The reverse says your own audience understands the app and strangers do not, which is a screenshot problem. Apple's analytics overview suggests the same filter and adds one for campaigns.

Give a new app time before you diagnose it. A few dozen impressions in the first week is too little to judge anything, and a change to the listing needs about two weeks of data on each side.

App download statistics: how many downloads does an average app get

Nobody publishes a reliable median, so the honest answer is built from totals. The figures below are the ones that can be opened and checked as of October 2026.

Divide Apple's weekly downloads by its app count and you get about 428 downloads per app per week, or roughly 22,000 a year. That is a mean, and it describes almost no real app. A small number of very large apps pull it far above what a typical app sees, and the search figure in the same report shows how uneven the store is: in an average week about 7.6% of apps reach the top 10 for a meaningful number of searches. Plan from your own first weeks and treat the mean as trivia.

The estimate rows come from Business of Apps' app download statistics. They do not line up with Apple's count, and should not be expected to: Apple's weekly average multiplied by 52 is about 48 billion a year from its own records, while the Business of Apps figure for iOS is an outside estimate of 36.6 billion, and the two are not counted the same way. Use each source for what it is good at. Apple's numbers describe the store, and the estimate describes the split between the two stores.

How to See How Many Downloads an App Has

For your own app, App Analytics in App Store Connect has the exact numbers. In Apple's tech talk on acquisition analytics, Apple separates two counts. First time downloads are the taps on Get or Buy the first time someone downloads the app. Redownloads are downloads after the app was deleted, made by tapping the cloud icon, and only the ones started in the App Store count: automatic downloads to a person's other devices are left out. Total downloads is the two added together, and you can split any of them by territory, source type and page type.

Page type is the least known of these and often the most useful. The same tech talk describes three common values: the product page, the store sheet (the panel that slides up when another app or an ad opens your listing without leaving that app), and no page, which means someone downloaded from the Today, Games or Apps tabs or from search results without opening your page at all. If you buy ads or work with creators, compare conversion for the product page and the store sheet, since Apple notes that you and your ad networks can choose which one people land on.

For someone else's app there is no official count. Apple does not publish downloads per app, and the closest public signal on the product page is the number of ratings. App intelligence firms sell estimates: Sensor Tower, for example, says it estimates downloads with its own modeling and panel based methods and presents them as directional. Treat any competitor figure as a range, and compare apps within one vendor's data only.

How to Get App Downloads Before Launch With Pre Orders

A pre order lets people order the app before it is out, and Apple's pre order page explains what happens: a limited version of your product page goes live, people can order, and on release day the app downloads to their devices automatically and they get a notification. Pre orders are discoverable in search results, and on the Today, Games and Apps tabs if Apple is featuring the app. Apple's conversion rate counts pre orders together with downloads, so the work on your listing starts paying off before launch.

• Send a featuring nomination of the App Launch type at the same time. The nomination form covers pre orders, and Apple asks for at least three weeks of notice.
• Point every prelaunch post, email and creator video at the pre order page with a campaign link, so the orders show up by channel.
• Use the App Store pre order badge and the words Pre order on the App Store, which Apple's page suggests, and leave the release date out of anything you cannot update if it might slip.
• Apple Ads can promote an app while it is available for pre order, so search ads can start before launch day.
• Update the badges and links on release day, so nothing still says pre order once the app is out.

Ideas for what to post during the pre order window, from the teaser to the launch day announcement, are in the app launch announcement examples.

How to increase app downloads on Google Play

Everything outside the store works the same way for Android. Inside it, the report has different names. Google's Play Console help sorts store listing traffic into three sources, and they are not the same split as Apple's.

The difference matters when you compare stores. On Google Play a search for a generic phrase is filed under explore, and only searches for your name count as search, so a small search row there is normal. Play Console's conversion analysis page reports visitors, clicks and click through rate for the listing and lets you filter by traffic source, country and campaign. The listing fields and experiments on Google Play are laid out in how to market an app.

What not to do: bought installs, incentivized reviews and bots

Services that sell installs, ratings or chart positions are easy to find and are the fastest way to lose a developer account. Apple's rules are explicit, and its enforcement numbers are public.

• The App Review Guidelines open their business section by warning that manipulating reviews or inflating chart rankings with paid, incentivized, filtered or fake feedback, or hiring a third party service to do it, may get you expelled from the Apple Developer Program.
• Section 5.6.3, titled Discovery Fraud, says that manipulating charts, search, reviews or referrals to your app "erodes customer trust and is not permitted."
• Section 3.2.2 says an app must not force users to rate it, review it or download other apps in order to reach a feature. A reward for a review is the classic way to break it.
• Section 5.6.1 requires Apple's own prompt for reviews and disallows custom ones.
• The Apple Developer Program License Agreement forbids acts intended to interfere with the App Store and gives fraudulent reviews of your own or another developer's app as its example, in section 3.2. Its termination clause, section 11.2, names falsifying consumer reviews among the grounds for ending the agreement.

The fraud provision is enforced at scale, for every kind of fraud it covers. The transparency report lists 193,035 developer accounts terminated in 2025, and 192,702 of them under that provision of the license agreement. Apple's fraud prevention report for 2025 says the company processed over 1.3 billion ratings and reviews and blocked close to 195 million fraudulent ones, kept nearly 7,800 deceptive apps out of search results and kept another 11,500 off the charts.

Set the rules aside and bought installs still fail on arithmetic. A person paid to install has no use for the app and deletes it, so sessions, retention and ratings fall behind your download count, and those are the signals that follow you into search. If you want to pay for downloads, pay Apple: an ad in search results reaches someone who just typed what your app does.

A weekly routine to increase app downloads

Downloads respond to small changes made regularly and measured each time. This review takes about 30 minutes a week once the links are in place.

Once a month, compare your conversion rate with the peer group benchmark and review the keyword field. For each major release, send the featuring nomination, set up an in app event if the release fits one, and announce it everywhere your users might see it.

Where Spreadcast fits: keeping the social source fed

Most of this guide is work only you can do. One part of it is repetitive: the post for every update, every good review and every rating milestone, on every network, each needing a design. That is the part Spreadcast takes over. You paste your App Store link once at the start page, and it checks your public listing every day. A new version, a new 5 star review or a rating milestone becomes a designed post built from your own icon and screenshots, and Spreadcast publishes it to Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, Pinterest, Bluesky, Mastodon, Telegram and Discord, plus YouTube for video posts with a caption written for each.

The free plan drafts every post for you to download, with a small Spreadcast mark. Pro is $29 a month flat, with design, captions and publishing to all 8 networks included, and Studio is $79 a month for 5 apps and 3 seats. A post that quotes a reviewer waits for your approval, in line with Apple's permission rule. Spreadcast works with apps on the App Store and makes still image posts, so keep a video editor for clips. Plans are on the pricing page.

It does not produce downloads by itself, and we make no claim about how many a post will bring. What it does is keep the app referrer source supplied in the weeks when you are busy shipping, so an update that most people receive in the background, without reading the notes, gets announced somewhere they will see it. Put a campaign link in each profile and App Analytics will tell you what that is worth for your app. More on how it works for mobile apps and for indie developers.