Following up: my little nicotine app was quiet, so I looked at the funnel instead of blaming the app

A month or so ago I posted here about Wean Nicotine, the small local-first app I built for tapering off nicotine pouches instead of quitting cold turkey. One-time purchase, no accounts, everything stays on the phone. Thanks for the replies on that first post. The privacy-marketing question I asked ended up being something I chewed on for weeks.

Quick update on what happened since. I kept shipping. The app now shows you your usage patterns over time and quietly marks the moment you reach your goal, plus a couple of rounds of polish. But the thing worth sharing is less about features and more about a mindset trap I walked straight into.

Downloads have been slow. My honest first instinct was that something must be wrong with the app, so I started making a list of things to change. Before touching anything I made myself look at where people actually find it, across web search, the App Store, and the site. The humbling part was that the app was not really the problem. When people reached the full listing, they responded fine. Almost nobody was reaching it. I had been about to redesign a shop that barely anyone was walking past.

So instead of changing the product I did a proper App Store optimisation pass. I rewrote the keywords and a couple of the subtitles to match the actual phrases people search, in each of my languages, rather than the words I happened to like. No code, just metadata. It shipped a few days ago and I am watching to see if it moves anything, though Apple's numbers lag about a week so I do not know yet.

Here is my question for the room, and a specific one so it is easy to answer. For anyone who has done ASO seriously, did rewriting your keywords and subtitles actually move your organic App Store search, and roughly how long before you saw it? I am trying to gauge whether the metadata is worth the effort, or whether getting people to the listing from outside is the only real lever.

Wean Nicotine, if you want a look. One-time purchase, no subscription.