How to get featured on the App Store by making Apple look good

Ultimately Apple wants to promote great apps. But they’re also motivated to showcase apps that make their platform look good. They’re competing with Android and trying to sell more iPhones, so if you can help them in their efforts, they’re happy to help you.

This isn’t that crazy of a concept. You see it everywhere. Target is going to promote items that get people in their stores. The movie theater is going to advertise the movie they think will pull in the most people.

Microsoft has done this with games since forever. Bill Gates even dressed up as the Doom Guy to promote Doom being on Windows 95:

Pretend Apple is your customer

What does Apple want? Easy: they want to sell iPhones, so they’re constantly trying to make them better. They also need to get the word out about these killer new features they’re making, and what better way than to ask their wonderful ecosystem of developers to showcase all the possibilities.

Apple announces those new-tech opportunities with plenty of time for you to act. It’s an easy win. Just set aside the time and resources to get after it in time for Apple’s launch.

Watch out though! Sometimes there are consequences for using some new tech. Like with iCloud. I jumped on that early, but now my app is locked to my developer account. You can’t transfer apps that have the iCloud entitlement .

Also, what if the tech just isn’t there yet? If you can figure out how to use ARKit to make a killer real-time multiplayer game then bless you, but it’s not gonna be easy.

It’s also important to ultimately keep your real customer’s best interest in mind. If you’re Burner — maybe don’t hop on any new feature that gets added to location tracking. Sure, think of Apple as your customer, but always put your actual customers first.

Successful Examples

Here are 3 examples of how I was able to get featured with my algebra math app .

1: Emailing the big boss

The first time was the summer after the iPad came out. I had just released my app and was hoping to be part of the inevitable Back to School promotion. The iPad looked perfect for classrooms, so why wouldn’t they try to promote apps that would encourage schools to grab an iPad? Well, I was right that they would have a promotion, but wrong that they’d notice me. I didn’t get featured! I was pretty irate since the apps they did feature didn’t seem out of my league. MathBoard was pretty interesting, but the rest were basic flash card apps… so I decided to email Steve Jobs about it. This was back in the day when there was the occasional story in the news about a Steve email, so it didn’t seem that far out of reach. He didn’t respond, but I totally got featured the next week.

As you can see from the timestamp it was pretty impulsive. I had worked non-stop all summer on it and was devastated. I’m glad the desperateness of my situation didn’t come across in the email.

Cross-platform iCloud

The next time was the summer after the iCloud release. I wanted to play around with the Mac App Store, but I needed something exciting to announce. iCloud had been out for less than a year and didn’t seem to be huge in the developer community, so that seemed like a great way to score points with Apple. You’d magically be able to share data between the iOS and Mac versions of my app! Win / win for Apple and my customers! I also did an overhaul of the equation editor in my iOS app, and released both around the same time.

This totally worked and got me featured on the Mac App Store.

iOS 7 Redesign

The last time was with Apple’s big iOS 7 redesign. This was a radical change, so if you didn’t update your app you’d be looking like old news pretty soon. It was also a great opportunity because of the workload involved, so if you were willing to invest the time you could really stand out. My bet paid off and I got featured soon after the iOS 7 release:

That was the best promotion. Everyone was at least curious about the new redesign and were checking the App Store. This surge got my app to #1 in education:

Right place, right time

You can’t predict what Apple will do or what Apple will want. But if you keep grinding out a solid experience for your users, you’ll be in the position to take advantage of opportunities. It’s like catching a literal wave. If you’re out in the water getting good at swimming and surfing, you’ll be in the right place and have the skills needed to ride that wave when it comes. But you can’t just run out into the water after you see that wave coming in, it’ll be too late! And you probably wouldn’t know what to do with it anyways!

Do you have any other examples of App Store feature stories? Please let me know below or on Twitter: @regularberry

• Sean Berry

  Software Engineer