Importance of icon and screenshots for AppStore. Practical experiment
In his great and very useful article @girishrawat mentioned importance of having attractive icon and screenshot for getting higher download rates for the app. I decided to check these hypotheses on practice and I am going to share my results with you.
I have quite simple app in appStore — interactive credit calculator. The app was produced and released quite fast and was not updated for last 4–5 months. So, it was ideal app for testing. Initially screenshots and icon were created very fast with low designing skills.
Icon
Screenshots
And with this icon and screenshots I had following downloads statistics:
It was about 10 new daily users, mostly from Russia. I had no any ad companies, all the traffic was directly from AppStore search. I decided to update icon and screenshots to attract more traffic to my app. So, after spending half of the day with Figma I created new icon and new screenshots according to all recommendations:
I had quite high expectations after releasing app with new graphical assets, but in fact, after 2 weeks results were poor and I was not satisfied:
We got downloads rate higher in the first few days after release, but then average rate returned to pre-release level and now it's about same 10 users a day.
Resume
- Making icons and screenshots is quite easy and not so expensive, so it can be recommended as fast-way to start
- I think that icon and screenshots surely make influence to download rates, but Apple looks precisely at other app users metrics as well. And it's hard to say which metrics are more important
So, having good and attractive images is only one part of complex work! Have nice icons!
