Increasing user acquisition for your app starts with app store optimization. 30% of downloads occur after someone has searched by keywords in Google Play. So getting noticed within the app marketplace can already drive up user downloads before looking at any other type of promotion.

John Cooper, founder of Pyxis Ventures, shares his personal experiences with promoting apps.

There’s been much talk about App Store Optimizations (ASO) and tools are emerging to get that extra attention in app store search rankings. The good folks at XYO have been studying app search behavior since 2010. Recently, they talked to all the major ASO companies and got their feedback for their presentation on the topic. In this guest post, they’re happy to share the comments of ASO players and their own insights on the state of ASO.

[Geroge Karavias, co-founder of Anlock, shares his experiences in marketing kids’ educational apps and proposes a survivor kit to keep in mind when navigating the treacherous waters of this category.] You might have started thinking that putting together an educational app may not be such a bad idea, I mean how hard can it be? Of the App Store’s top 200 paid list of iPad educational apps, 70% are kids’ educational apps. Out of these, roughly 80% are by independent developers…

As long as there are algorithms impacting revenues there will be people trying to game them. In the world of mobile apps there are two sorts of algorithm that can be routes to success, chart rankings and search rankings. Chart rankings are very simple and typically just use some time-weighted download volume. Search rankings are much more complex, involving keywords, reviews and other social or similarity-based data as well as downloads. Developers can use a range of tactics to improve their ranking in these algorithms, some of them much more legitimate than others.

Apple and Google dominate the app store game – but only in terms of size. Senior Analyst Andreas Pappas discusses the key success factors for app stores, why Google is lagging behind and how Amazon fits in the whole picture.

[The explosive growth of app ecosystems is creating serious bottlenecks in app discovery that only popular apps can overcome. Having 700,000 apps is great for platform vendors, but not so great for developers, whose apps are lost in the heap. Andreas Pappas takes a look at the app discovery problem and considers whether social discovery […]

With well over one million total apps available on Apple and Google app stores combined, plus hundreds of thousands on the other platforms, the competition to get on consumers’ handsets is fierce. As hundreds of apps are added each and every day, app discovery remains a largely unsolved challenge which is only getting worse. With […]

Bryson Meunier from Search Engine Land compiled a list of the 100 most searched for keywords in both Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store, for new apps. The data was gathered in June using Google’s keyword tool, so it isn’t exactly perfect, but it’s good enough to have a discussion about what works and […]

Apple pushed out iOS6 to its customers earlier this month. According to Pocket, a popular service that lets you “bookmark” articles you might want to read at some point in the future, over 60% of their users have already updated to iOS 6. Chitika, an analytics company, reported similar adoption rates. Within 48 hours of […]