[Webinar recap] ASO Foundations in 2025: What Still Works, What’s Changing?

Arazoo Kadir from Yodel Mobile hosted a webinar with Kai Singhvi-Hanns (also from Yodel) and our own Yaroslav Rudnitsky from AppFollow, talking about App Store Optimization. In case you missed it or you registered and forgot to show up, we took notes so you don't have to sit through the recording. Speaking of which, it’s right here in case you’d like to hear about these valuable ASO strategies instead of reading about them:

65% of app downloads still come from organic search. While you're burning cash on Meta ads that cost twice what they did three years ago, most users are literally just typing stuff into the App Store search bar and downloading whatever shows up first.

It’s a bottleneck. Every user, whether they saw your billboard or clicked your Instagram ad, all end up at your app store listing. You can't skip it, can't bypass it. You've got one page to convince them, and if that page is bad, nothing else matters. People are also downloading fewer apps now. They're not experimenting like they used to. But they're spending way more time in the apps they keep, so breaking into someone's phone is harder than ever. The window is smaller - your listing needs to be perfect, or actually, no... it needs to be better than perfect because perfect is what everyone else is aiming for.

The search behavior shift is real, though. Users aren't quite typing "fitness" anymore, but rather whole sentences like "workout app for busy moms with bad knees". This isn't just voice search doing its thing, people genuinely search differently now. You need to think about this when you're picking keywords.

Could your ASO strategy be outdated?

ASO. Most people treat it like SEO's boring cousin. You stuff some keywords in, upload decent screenshots, and call it a day. In reality, it’s just two things: visibility and conversion. Everything else is tactics.

For visibility, you need to understand your competition isn't who you think it is. If you run a meditation app, you're not just competing with Calm and Headspace. You're competing with YouTube meditation videos. You're competing with TikTok for attention. You're competing with some random app that's huge in Korea that you've never heard of. Your competitor research is too narrow, because competing against the direct competition is what we’re used to and what makes most sense.

You also can't just optimize for your brand name and call it done. You need keyword buckets. Brand searches, generic searches, seasonal searches, competitor searches. Each bucket needs different treatment. The seasonal stuff is interesting... you can literally rank for "New Year fitness app" if you time your updates right.

Burger King and Strava are examples of good creativity. The Strava listing makes the most sense. Orange on black. Pops in light mode, dark mode, whatever new thing Apple invents next. Clear value props in the screenshots, social proof everywhere. The video shows the app working, not some abstract lifestyle nonsense.

Less than 3% of people read the description, by the way. Three percent! You spent hours crafting that perfect description? Oh well, nobody cares. Your screenshots, your ratings, your app icon... that's what matters. The description is mostly for the algorithm on Android. On iOS, it doesn't even affect your keyword rankings.

Hypothesis, test, implement, analyze, repeat. Not revolutionary, but most people optimize once and forget about it. You need a regular cadence. Weekly keyword checks. Monthly creative updates. Quarterly deep dives.

What’s changing the most in 2025 and beyond?

iOS and Android are diverging hard, and you need completely different strategies for each. You can't copy-paste anymore.

Apple just launched something genuinely interesting in September 2025. Organic custom product pages. You can now create different app store experiences for different search terms. Someone searches "budget travel"? Show them the cheap flights angle. Someone searches "business travel"? Show them the premium features. This is huge and nobody's really using it yet.

The AI review summaries on iOS are brutal. Apple's algorithm reads all your reviews and creates an automatic summary that sits right at the top. If your app has issues, that AI is going to tell everyone about them. You can't hide behind your five-star reviews anymore when the AI is summarizing all the one-star complaints.

Android's doing completely different things. You can add multiple YouTube videos now. Not just one promo video, but multiple videos showing different features. They've also added cart abandonment reminders for in-app purchases, which is... weird but probably effective. The natural language processing shift on Google Play is real. The algorithm is getting better at understanding conversational searches. You need to think about how people talk about their problems, not just what keywords have high volume.

In-app events and why you should use them

In-app events! They've been around for years but nobody uses them properly. You can run them for 30 days, highlight seasonal stuff, product launches, whatever. The platforms actively promote apps that run events.

DataCamp is a good example. They ran an event for a ChatGPT course. 80% growth in re-downloads. Ranked for 22 new AI keywords. 25% boost in organic revenue. All in one month. From one in-app event.

The trick is you get extra metadata fields with events. More places to put keywords. More visibility. Plus, Apple and Google look for active events when choosing who to feature. You're raising your hand saying "hey, we have something new," and they reward you for it. You can run five events at once. Each for 30 days. You could theoretically always have something running. Black Friday, summer sale, back to school, random Tuesday promotion. Whatever. Just keep the store listing fresh.

What tools to use

You don't need expensive ASO tools to start. You can track your rankings manually. You can check competitors in the actual app stores. You can build dashboards in Google Sheets. But once you're serious, you need real data. The visibility scores, the keyword tracking, the competitor monitoring. You can't eyeball this stuff anymore. The competition is using tools, so you're fighting with spreadsheets against people with dashboards.

Cross-localization only works on iOS. The US indexes keywords from nine other markets. So if you're not targeting Vietnam, you can use the Vietnamese localization for US keywords. It's a hack, but it works.

Gems of wisdom from the Q&A session

Category rankings stuck at 11th or 12th place? Your keywords are probably just bad. You're ranking for stuff nobody searches for. Clean out the junk keywords, start regular updates. Try for a feature.

What about promotional text? On iOS, it doesn't help with keywords at all. The algorithm doesn't index it. But it affects conversion, so you still need to optimize it. On Android, everything gets indexed, so your long description matters for rankings.

Speaking of the relationship between paid and organic, it’s messy. Paid campaigns boost download velocity, which helps rankings. But if your paid traffic doesn't convert because your listing doesn't match your ads, you're hurting your organic performance. Everything's connected in annoying ways.

And, how does one go about measuring in-app events impact? The answer: isolate them. Don't change anything else for those 30 days. Track your normal metrics. See what moves. It's not complicated, you just need discipline to not mess with other variables.

Afterword

Your app store listing is still your most important asset. More important than your Instagram account. More important than your fancy website. It's where the money happens.

You need different strategies for iOS and Android. Not slightly different. Completely different. Different keywords, different creative approaches, different update cycles. If you're using the same strategy for both, you're leaving money on the table.

Start using in-app events. Seriously. Nobody's doing them well, which means easy wins for you. Plan out a calendar. Run something every month. Track the results. It's free visibility.

Fix your keyword strategy. Get rid of the vanity keywords that sound good but don't convert. Focus on long-tail conversational searches. Think about how real people describe their problems, not what keywords tools tell you to target.

Your creative needs work. I know it does because everyone's does. Test new screenshots. Test videos. Test different value props. The first impression is everything, and you're probably wasting it.

Finally, stop treating ASO like a one-time project. It's ongoing, iterative, and often boring. But it's also where most of your users come from. While everyone else chases the new shiny growth hack, you could just... make your app store listing exciting.

Hope it helped, and good luck out there!