ASO on a small market: what I have read up on and what I am testing
Title, screenshots and localisation in a store listing — the advice that makes sense, plus notes from my own beginnings.
Shipping an app is the easier part. Getting anyone to find it takes months more. I am fairly early in this myself — I publish apps in the evenings and I am learning ASO as I go — but I have read a good deal about it and tried some of it out. I am writing this up mainly because I found the advice hard to locate in one place, and it might save someone else the time.
One mistake I can confirm from experience: changing everything at once. Title, screenshots and description in a single afternoon. When the numbers then move, you have no idea why. The usual recommendation is to change one thing and give it time — and the smaller the market, the longer it takes before anything can be read from it.
The title carries most of the weight
This is probably the most common piece of advice you will run into, and it makes sense: the title field is indexed most heavily. In Czech, competition for most phrases is also minimal, so even a small change can show. The practical consequence — instead of just the app name, the title should say what the app does, something like "interval timer".
The rule I take from it: the first two words of the title belong to what the app does. The brand comes after.
For an established brand the opposite is probably true. This is the view of someone nobody has heard of yet.
Screenshots are not a gallery
It is repeatedly stated that the vast majority of people see the first two screenshots and scroll no further. A few recommendations follow from that, which I have adopted:
- A short caption above the shot, under five words. Nobody reads a longer one.
- Show the result, not the empty state after install.
- Do not mix light and dark mode in one row, it looks disorganised.
The last one is what I have actually verified for myself — after rearranging the screenshots, the listing finally looked like it came from someone who knows what they are doing.
Localisation as a cheap way to widen reach
I overlooked this one for a long time and consider it the most underrated: translating a store listing is an afternoon's work and requires no change to the code. For an app that works in other languages anyway, it is a shame to have the page only in Czech. A small market widens at practically no cost.
What I want to avoid
Paying for traffic before the listing is in order. You send people to a page that cannot convince them, and you learn nothing useful in the process. The order that makes sense: listing first, traffic second.
Please take this as notes from someone who is learning, not as a guide from a person with dozens of published apps. Most of the points above are commonly shared practice — what I can add myself is, so far, mainly the places where I tripped.
