The ASO Checklist for a New App Launch: 22 Checks

Twenty-two checks, ordered by impact rather than by how easy they are. If you only do the first six, you will have covered most of what actually moves a new app.

Last updated 20 August 2026 · by the ASOWeb team

Metadata (checks 1–8)

1. Your app name carries your single most valuable keyword. Thirty characters on iOS, thirty on Play. The name field is weighted most heavily in both stores.
2. Your subtitle covers a second shelf, not a slogan. “Track habits & build streaks” beats “Your life, simplified”.
3. The 100-character keyword field has no repeated words: not across fields, not in singular and plural.
4. No spaces after commas in the keyword field. In a ten-term list that alone recovers ten characters.
5. Your app name, developer name and category are absent from the keyword field. All three are indexed already.
6. Your Google Play full description is written for indexing, with target terms appearing naturally two to four times. Play indexes it; Apple does not.
7. Your Play short description leads with the core phrase. Eighty characters, heavily weighted, and the first thing shown.
8. You have no competitor brand names anywhere. Both stores remove them and you will not outrank a brand for its own name.

Creatives and conversion (checks 9–14)

Ranking gets you seen. Creatives decide whether being seen turns into an install, and because install rate feeds back into ranking, these are not separate problems.

9. Your first three screenshots tell the whole story. Most people never scroll. Assume you get three.
10. Each screenshot has a caption stating a benefit. A bare UI screenshot asks the viewer to work out what your app does.
11. Your icon is legible at 60 pixels. Look at it on a real device beside your competitors, not zoomed in on a monitor.
12. You have an app preview video if your app is visual or demonstrative. Skip it if it is a utility, a bad video is worse than none.
13. Your first screenshot differs visibly from the top competitors. If four apps on the shelf use the same purple gradient, be the one that does not.
14. You have tested at least one alternative first screenshot. Custom Product Pages on iOS and store listing experiments on Play both make this free.

Ratings and reviews (checks 15–18)

15. You ask for ratings at a moment of success, not on launch. After a task completes, not when the app opens.
16. You reply to negative reviews. Replies are public, they often flip the original rating, and on iOS you can edit a reply later.
17. You watch for review spikes after each release. Three one-star reviews mentioning the same thing in a week is a bug report, not bad luck.
18. Your rating prompt respects the platform limits: iOS allows three prompts per year per user, and burning them early wastes the year.

Localisation and expansion (checks 19–22)

19. You have added en-GB alongside en-US (or the reverse). It is a second full keyword field for the same language and takes minutes.
20. Your biggest non-English market has a real localisation, not a machine translation of your English keywords.
21. You track rankings per storefront. A term you own in the US may be unwinnable in Germany, and an average across both hides it.
22. You have a baseline before you start changing things. At least a week of daily rank data, so you can tell your own effect from ordinary movement.

What to do first if you only have an hour

Checks 1, 2, 3, 9, 11 and 19. Between them they cover the two most heavily weighted metadata fields, the keyword field's commonest waste, the two creatives that decide conversion, and the cheapest keyword expansion available.

Everything else is worth doing, but those six are where an hour returns the most.

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