ASO.dev — My Journey of Making Another Product for Apple

Everyone has their own life path and choice of products. For me, it seems like I have a fetish for creating products for Apple and using their APIs… For four years now, I’ve been making a player for Apple Music, and on November 20, 2022, my wife and I came up with and started working on ASO.dev.

Since September 2022, we’ve significantly rewritten the player, adding Spotify support and wanting to attract more users to the project.

Developing an indie project without marketing funds and, indeed, without any money is very hard, so all traffic for meows.app comes from the App Store — the app gets ~25,000 new organic installations per month (purely from search, with room to grow).

Yearly Changes (need to increase the “conversion rate”)
The app is available in 39 localizations (all in the App Store), at that time still using translations and tables from Google done manually.

This became a problem, which led us to create ASO.dev. When you need to translate “What’s New” into many languages, you just end up writing “Bug fixes and improvements”, limiting your ASO to just a few countries.

So, what is this ASO, darn it?! ASO stands for AppStore Search Optimization (it took me less than half a year to explain this to you).

Simply put, it’s about attracting users from app store searches (App Store, Google Play, and others).

Generally, ASO is quite complex and expensive, with service rates typically starting at $100 per month. There are cheaper options, but they offer almost no features; at best, you can make half the changes due to tariff limitations.

A bit of ASO theory: people take an app and compile a list of keywords for it (there are many tools for this) — it’s long, complicated, and expensive.

ASO specialists are very hardworking :D They manually create keyword lists for 10 countries in Word!

A nightmare for me…

Many either don’t do localization at all or leave it out of their ASO strategy.

I wasn’t ready to spend a lot of money on professionals, so I decided to spend six months (of course, the deadline was missed) to write my solution — better, simpler, and working differently — as I see it!