Currently the Android App Store holds over 2.8 million apps and the Apple App Store 2.2 million. This is an immense amount of competition for visibility inside the already confined space, causing so many apps to fall flat unable to generate any volume from either organic or paid search. But are the likes of Google and Apple making it too hard for developers to establish themselves and be discovered?
The first big issue is discovery, but the second is downloads. How do you turn an impression into a download? This is where the App Store’s are helping developers, by having categories and rankings developers can in theory compete within smaller markets. This enables apps targeting the right areas and audiences to have a better fighting chance.
A limited number of characters for keywords and titles are what should separate one app from another. The App Store’s allow developers to directly approach their identified audiences and attempt to convert an impression into a download.
It’s easy for you to want your app seen by every person possible, but this is not what the platforms are intending your strategy to be. It’s about providing the right app for the right task to the correct person. The App Store’s allow developers to build on their visibility, it’s important to understand that this very rarely happens overnight.
It can therefore be argued that the App Store’s are in fact making it easier to solve the issue of app discovery. Through implementing the right promotion strategies and having the correct audiences recognized, app discovery will come. Without these measures taken by the App Store’s it would seem that only big well established brands and apps would have a chance of discovery, leaving smaller less established apps to remain lost amongst the ever growing app industry.