How to get your iOS app featured on the App Store

Recorded March 24th 2020 – watch the full episode on YouTube.

What can iOS developers do help get their app featured by Apple on the App Store?

James Thomson: Say Apple has some super new shiny technology that they're wanting to push. If you adopt said technology in your app and Apple will go, "Oh look, this person has done the work, they've supported Siri shortcuts well," then you're more likely to get on a short list of, "Here are apps that are supporting this," and get featured on the store.

If you do that, you know the other thing is the press like to talk about, “well, here's new shiny things and here are some apps that do it." So that has been our strategy, I mean I use strategy in quotes. One thing that I'm known for at least is, a new technology comes out, how can I crowbar it inside a calculator?

"Apple has some super new shiny technology that they're wanting to push. If you adopt said technology in your app and Apple will go, "Oh look, this person has done the work, they've supported Siri shortcuts well," then you're more likely to get on a short list of, "Here are apps that are supporting this," and get featured on the store."

Paul Hudson: So folks, if you're listening to this right now and you want to know what is a killer tip of being featured because let's face it, PCalc's been featured a heck of a lot over the years. You see Apple ARKit, whatever it is, Core ML comes out, can you find a way to get that into your app in a meaningful productive way and let them know about it? Rip off James.

James Thomson: It's not ripping off, it's more that a rising tide lifts all boats – a healthy app ecosystem. Literally five minutes before we started recording I sent a bit of code to another developer who was like, "Oh, how do you do this?" I was like, "Well, here's the code I have. Here you go." I'm quite happy generally to do that kind of thing and try and help people.

I'm not going to give them all my code, but it's like ever since I started doing this, which was quite a while ago, back heady days when there were lots of app launches, and DragThing was in its heyday, I knew all the other people who were writing launches and we would swap codes and snippets and stuff and it's like, "How do you do this? How do you get the icon for this?" And it's like, "Oh here you go." It wasn't like a competition. We were all kind of competing with each other, but we were trying to be part of a community as well. I mean, don't get me wrong, if somebody started ripping me off, I would be quite unhappy but it's trying to be nice.

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