App Store Product Page

Building a high-quality app is very hard, but you have to remember, all of that is wasted if no one knows what your app does, or you can't attract people to download it.

The last thing you want is to mislead people into trying your app.

Trying to find a set of words that is very short, has good search results on the App Store, hasn't existed before, and describes exactly what your thing is... borderline impossible, but somehow you have to do it every time you release a game.

If you look at what brand new users see, the first thing they see is your name and the subtitle.

It actually appears in a lot of different places.

The subtitle is just about letting people know what your app does and who it's for.

And those two things are important to go back to all the time.

Many people are going to glimpse your icon for maybe a second or two.

And so, that's going to be the first thing that can really suck someone in.

We actually use the icon not just to garner interest, but also, to kind of communicate what's going on in the game. We've tested... anything you can think of.

We’ve tried different poses, we've tried different dragons.

We took the ks in the word Grokker and I said, "Hmm, if we put them back to back, it kinda makes a heart shape." And that's that love, that connection that you feel.

If you have a character in your app that you know is a popular character, that's probably going to be part of your winning app icon.

This is our main icon, with the Glitch.

The Glitch has proven tough to beat in terms of A/B testing. Just something about his happy, goofy smile.

You look at all of the research, how do people want to consume content? They want to consume it through video.

One of the great things about the app preview is that it actually autoplays. It's a great opportunity to catch somebody's eye and say, "Hey look, this is something really exciting." We added voiceover about a year ago, and we actually saw a really dramatic effect on both installs and conversion.

We test whether or not two videos is better, or one, it turns out for us that three videos works really well. I try to make it so that as you start going through the screenshots, you're coming up with how to play the game in your head, so that you've already played the game before you download it, and that's how you know that you're going to enjoy downloading it. I think it gives authenticity and a little bit of confidence to the consumer to be able to say, "Yup. I'm going to download this and I'm going to enjoy it." Most of all, we make sure the first three lines are very concise and, alone, are able to communicate something about the game.

Consumers are really smart. A pixel here, a pixel there isn't what makes the difference. "Is this a feature that's good for me?" "Does this do something for me that's meaningful?" You have to grab people. Making a bold statement to start with hopefully encourages them to carry on reading. So figuring out how to get in the promotional text, what's the messaging at that moment in time. We try to connect it with whatever's going on seasonally.

We use promoted in app purchases.

It's an opportunity not just to allow your existing users to buy something easily. It's also an opportunity to kind of communicate something about the game.

I do think it's cool if people are returning to this page, and that they might see in-app purchases that they missed, and go "Oh, I didn't know that those new clue puzzles were out." So, that's cool.

All of these things incrementally add up, and when you consistently improve across all of those things, the downloads follow. One of the big surprises was you're not going to be an overnight sensation no matter how great you think your app is, so plan accordingly. Ultimately, it was very rewarding, and it was exciting to push through, even though it was very hard in the early years. Keep going, keep trying, keep listening. You have this opportunity to connect with a huge base of users worldwide, but you know, first you have to persuade people to make the download. [ music ]