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Apple's New App Store May Gift Indie Developers Millions of App Installs Overnight

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Some very, very fortune app publishers will see massive boosts in downloads when Apple turns the new App Store on in late summer or early fall. That boost could be one million, three million or even 12 million new app installs, virtually overnight.

It's all thanks to Apple's new editorial App Store focus.

Apple

At the company's World Wide Developer Conference early this month, Apple announced a new App Store. While the store will have at least 25 major and minor new features, perhaps the most important one is a completely revamped home screen with a singular focus on one new app: a featured app of the day.

Featured apps have long received outsized benefits in terms of attention and installs.

Duolingo, for instance, rocketed up to a top-five app in terms of downloads from around 300th after being featured. Circa, the news aggregation app, saw app installs explode 59X overnight, partially due to press about being featured.

But the new featured slot is much, much bigger.

Apple's new featured apps will get full-screen billing on the home screen of the App Store, plus additional editorial treatment, including potentially multiple videos. And videos will be key to the new experience as Apple works hard to show off the most innovative apps, says Adobe VP of mobile Matt Asay:

"Take a payment app for instance; instead of only walking someone through the features, look to produce a humorous 15-second clip of people trying to split a bill.”

With the bigger slot and increased editorial attention come additional exposure and opportunity to convert views to app installs. That exposure comes with a truly massive audience: Apple revealed that the App Store currently gets about 500 million weekly visitors.

Data I study at TUNE (full disclosure: I help TUNE study and learn from the mobile ecosystem) suggests that when people check an app listing on the current App Store, 30-40% of them end up installing that app.

That number varies by category; in Navigation it can go as high as 70%.

Applying similar metrics to the new App Store reveals the huge opportunity:

  • 71 million people visit the App Store on an average day (which likely means it could spike to 150 million on a busy day)
  • 10-75 million people could see a featured app, depending on how many countries the app is featured in
  • conversion to install rates could be in the 20% neighborhood, based on what we see happening today plus the updates and improvements that Apple is making (and depending on the specific app being featured ... and its category)

The result could easily be millions of app installs in a single day.

And, in some cases with a fortunate confluence of hot apps, big traffic, and a little sprinkling of the internet's magic pixie dust, developers could see 15 million app installs in a single day. That would be both life-changing for many developers ... and server melting. (Apple will likely work with developers whose apps are going to be selected to ensure they can handle the extra volume.)

The downside?

It's likely fewer apps will get featured.

As mobile partnership platform Button's co-founder and chief product officer Chris Maddern says, "From a 'screen real estate' perspective, the large featured cards mean only 1-3 items fit fully on screen (depending on device), which could actually reduce the number of apps that users see in a session. Being featured will become even more important, and fewer will be featured.”

The new App Store does have quite a few new features that mobile publishers are excited to see, however.

One is something called "ratings reset."

"Ratings reset, so developers can choose to reset their ratings when submitting an update," explains Bean Creative's Layla Masri. "This has long been problematic if an update had a bug that caused the user rating to plummet ... lots of developers will appreciate the ability to choose to start fresh."

Another is the opportunity to tell your app's story much better.

"The new “Today” section is meant to be a daily destination for consumers to learn and discover new apps," says Adobe Experience Cloud vice president Matt Asay. "This will require brands to begin thinking about their apps differently. Just like with the media, marketers need to sell the story and industry impact, not just features. This will directly impact the content developed around the app itself and for good reason; the importance of search in the app store when it comes to discoverability for example, underscores the importance of better storytelling."

Asay says that a food app could sell itself as a health and fitness assistant, not just a receipe repository. And a productivity app could focus on how it helps free up time for friends and family.

Others have noted how the editorial focus parallels the new "story" features in apps like Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger:

"With this latest update, Apple appears to actually be increasing engagement and relevancy, with cues from other "story" platforms that garner high engagement, including Snapchat and Instagram," says Fiksu's Tom Cummings.

Some developers believe Apple's changes will help them go up-market with bigger, better, and more complex apps that consumers and purchasers need more information on before installing or buying.

"Apple has also added a "how to" section that helps explains how to get the most out of apps," says Pete Blair, a vice president at Applause. "This should be very helpful for non-game apps, especially in more complicated categories like video editing or productivity."

That's music to the ears of startups, who are looking for ways to bring on new customers.

"We’re a start-up that is working hard to gain a foothold in our category (health and fitness) and the more often we can get in front of users with more personal access, the more likely we can imprint on them the value of our app," says Joaquin Brown, CEO of Yoga Wake Up. "Stories feels a lot like news and even the routine of going to the app store daily is a lot like the routine of waking up with yoga - we’re all for inspiring users through healthy technology."

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