The app store's crony capitalism(why app store discovery is a joke)

A bit of a rant this morning.

App store featuring is a joke. (this post is inspired by a post by Joakim Achren , who you should def follow for his very insightful commentary on all things gaming biz and investing).

I've worked with many small indie app developers struggling to get any form of contact with Apple to pitch themselves for featuring - and repeatedly barreled into a wall of futility.

These were apps with very strong retention and monetization profiles - cold emails, and introductions were of no use in getting any response from Apple(leave alone be featured).

At the same time, I saw(as you would) lots of apps get featured on the front page of the app stores. Some would drive low-five figures of installs a day - changing their financial trajectory overnight(note that featuring has been far less of a gamechanger post 2016 or so).

Some of these featured apps were from big companies and well-known IPs - and others from small indie studios like us.

What were we missing? Why werent we getting featured?

Many offered platitudes of advice: "build a strong product and Apple will love you." - and the slightly more actionable: "build into your app the latest iOS features and Apple will feature you."

My reaction was: "well, we have top-of-the-line retention and monetization metrics. We've been able to scale from almost zero to 7 figures in UA spend profitably, while maintaining strong unit economics."

What ELSE do we have to do?

I gave up.

**

Until we got acquired by a public company.

In my first few weeks, I found out that Apple had a dedicated team whose mandate was to talk to our company, keep abreast of new launches - and ensuring that the games got featured. And our company had a team whose job it was to go down to Cupertino, pitch Apple and get featured.

I was shocked and surprised - it was a 'welcome-to-the-real-world' moment. There was a whole new game being played - and I wasnt even aware about it. It's the kind of thing you feel when you find out that the referee was being bribed - and it wasnt you after all.

All the talk of 'build a great product" and "aha we ONLY rely on organic user acquisition" obscured the reality that many products got a free ride to the half-way mark of a marathon race route.

So: the biggest developers get white glove treatment from Apple - and the small indies have no way to get any sort of spotlight(unless they get lucky and get 'spotted' by Apple - an exercise which is capricious and fickle at best).

**

Why things are this way - and why Apple does things this way is understandable.

This happens primarily because app store discovery has been - and continues to be broken. Eric Seufert 's lines from my interview a few years ago are still true(full interview here).

And in the presence of broken discovery, Apple's best bet is to feature mostly those developers that already make a lot of money on the platform - and a small number of seemingly randomly picked indies.

I'd much rather have the level playing field of a second-price auction of an ad marketplace than a capricious editor making these decisions on opaque criteria.

Apple has tried offering solutions - but Apple Search has been extremely hard to scale(how do you scale intent anyway?) and Apple's non-search placements have performed really badly for nearly every performance based advertiser I know.

And thanks to ATT, discovery from outside of the app stores is *also* broken in a way that makes things much much harder for all developers.

**

So: I dont want to end on a note of complaining - because you can either complain about the wave, or you can learn to surf. Some things that can help mitigate the impact of a broken discovery system:

Educate yourself about all things post-ATT through some of our (free) playbooks:

or check out our interviews with the smartest marketers in the world on the Mobile UA show: