App Store Optimization Tips: A 12-Point Checklist

Rank your fixes by what's actually missing

Most ASO checklists are alphabetical lists of every field a store exposes. That's useless for deciding what to do on a Tuesday afternoon. A better ordering is: how often does this fail in the wild, and how much work is the fix?

Bright App Data audited 6,634 live Google Play and App Store listings and scored each one. The failures are not evenly spread — they cluster hard in two places, and one commonly-cited "problem" barely exists.

1-4: spend the characters the store already gave you

The average audited title runs 21.5 characters against a 30-character limit on both stores. 8.5 indexed characters, unused. No other ASO change costs one edit and touches ranking directly.

Google Play and Apple diverge sharply below the title, and this is where copy-paste listings lose. Play gives you an 80-character short description plus a 4,000-character long description that is indexed for search. Apple gives you a 30-character subtitle and a dedicated keyword field buyers never see; it does not document the description as a keyword-indexed field. Writing one description for both stores means either wasting Play's index or writing 4,000 characters that carry no documented ranking role on Apple.

• 1. Extend the title toward 30 characters with one real search term — brand plus category, not three keywords chained with pipes.
• 2. Write Play's 80-character short description as a benefit line that also carries a keyword. It appears above the fold; it is the second-most-read text on the page.
• 3. Write Apple's 30-character subtitle separately. It is not a truncated short description.
• 4. Use Play's 4,000-character long description properly — natural repetition of the terms people search, in sentences you'd say out loud. Play's metadata policy targets keyword stuffing, and enforcement is a suspension risk, not a ranking risk.

5-7: creative, where the real gap is video

Screenshots are the field's solved problem. The average audited listing carries 13.1 of them, and only 2.5% (164 apps) have fewer than four. You are not going to win your category by adding a ninth screenshot.

84.1% of audited listings (5,581 apps) have no preview video. In most categories that means a video is an instant point of difference against roughly five of every six competitors. It's also the most expensive item here, which is exactly why the gap persists.

Order matters more than volume. The first two or three screenshots do nearly all the work, because that's what a phone shows without a swipe. Lead with the outcome the app produces, never a login screen or an empty state.

• 5. Rebuild the first three screenshots around outcomes, with readable captions at phone size.
• 6. Record a 15-30 second preview showing the core task end to end. A screen recording with captions beats no video, and beats a polished brand film that never gets made.
• 7. Check your icon at actual size on a home screen, not zoomed in a design tool.

8-10: reviews are a channel, not a scoreboard

47.4% of audited developers (3,143 apps) have never replied to a single review. The average reply rate across the set is 28.0%. The average listing receives 40.4 new reviews per month, so this isn't a volume problem — it's a habit that never got started.

Replying is worth the half hour because of who reads it. A visitor deciding whether to install skims the recent reviews, and a one-star complaint with a specific, non-defensive answer underneath reads very differently from the same complaint sitting alone. Users also update their ratings after a fix is confirmed, which is the only realistic way to move an established average.

Ask for ratings inside the app, at the moment something goes right — after a completed task, not on launch. Both stores provide a native rating prompt for this and prohibit gating rewards behind a positive review.

• 8. Reply to every one- and two-star review from the last 90 days. Name the fix or the version it lands in.
• 9. Trigger the native rating prompt after a success moment, not on app open.
• 10. Track which complaints repeat. 62.3% of audited apps (4,131) have at least one recurring complaint cluster, and that cluster predicts the rating far better than any listing edit.

11-12: hygiene and cadence

Only 0.8% of audited listings (56 apps) are missing a privacy policy link — near-universal compliance, because both stores enforce it at review. Check it anyway if you've never looked, since a broken link fails the same check as a missing one.

Release cadence is the signal a listing can't fake. A last-updated date eighteen months old tells a visitor the app is abandoned before they read a single word of your description, and it's the first thing acquisition buyers filter on.

• 11. Verify the privacy policy URL loads and matches the data your app actually collects.
• 12. Ship something every quarter, even small. Write real release notes — "bug fixes and improvements" wastes a field people read.

What a good score looks like, and what it doesn't buy you

The average ASO score across the audit was 77.6 out of 100, with grades splitting A 36.8%, B 36.6%, C 22.7%, D 3.8%, F 0.2%. A B grade is the middle of the field, not an achievement. The gap between B and A is almost always the video and the reply habit.

Every figure on this page is a snapshot of the audited catalog taken on 3 August 2026. The catalog grows continuously, so the live totals are higher than the counts quoted here.

None of this touches the numbers that decide whether an app survives. Install volume, store-listing conversion rate and retention live in the developer console and aren't visible from outside — anyone selling you a public estimate of your conversion rate is guessing. Listing work makes a good product easier to find. It cannot make a crashing app worth keeping.

You can check your own listing against these checks with the free public audit at /app-audit, compare against graded listings at /app-reports, and read exactly how each signal is scored at /methodology.