What Apple’s editors actually pick

How do you get featured on the App Store?

You get featured on the App Store by submitting a Featuring Nomination through App Store Connect, at least two weeks before the date you want covered and up to three months ahead for anything tied to a season or an event.¹ Apple’s editorial team reads those nominations against published criteria: user experience, design, innovation, accessibility and localization.¹ There is no fee and no paid route in. The nomination is the front door, and what you write on the form decides whether an editor gives your app a second minute.

The competition is arithmetic. About 2.42 million apps and games are live on the store, and more than 30,000 are added every month.² Editors are filling a finite number of slots against a calendar they set weeks ahead. Your job is not to argue that your app is good. It is to hand them something that fits a collection they already need to build.

What is Featuring Nominations and how do you submit one?

Featuring Nominations is the tool Apple added to App Store Connect in November 2024. It lets you put a launch, a significant update or an in-app event in front of the editorial team directly, one at a time in the interface or in bulk by CSV upload. It replaced an era of unstructured email and guesswork.

The mechanics take about ten minutes. Choose the app, choose what you are nominating, set the date the moment lands, pick the storefronts you want considered, and write the pitch. Apple asks for a minimum of two weeks of lead time and recommends up to three months.¹ That range is the most useful thing on the page, because it tells you how far ahead the editorial calendar is already set.

Where nominations fall over

• Nominating on release day. A two week minimum means a Tuesday launch nominated on the Monday before is out of scope before anyone reads it. Work backwards from the ship date, not forwards from the build.
• One nomination for the whole year. Launches, major updates and in-app events are separate submissions. An in-app event is a time-bound piece of content, a challenge, a premiere or seasonal content, that surfaces in App Store search and browse on its own and can earn featuring independently of the app.
• Writing to a press release brief. Editors are not covering your company. They are choosing what a person should download this week, and company milestones do not answer that question.

What does Apple’s editorial team actually look for?

Apple names five criteria: user experience, design, innovation, accessibility and localization.¹ They only become useful once you translate each one into something an editor can verify in a short session with your build.

Innovation is where most nominations are weakest, because teams describe a category instead of a capability. It helps to know what the store is currently rewarding. More than 40 of the top 100 App Store apps in 2025 shipped consumer-facing AI capabilities, and that group showed stronger billing growth.² Editors notice apps that make a new platform capability legible to an ordinary user, which is a different thing from having the technology in the stack.

One factor the published criteria do not spell out is recency. This is inference from practitioner accounts rather than stated policy, but ratings velocity, meaning recent review volume and its direction, tells an editor whether an app is healthy now. A lifetime star average accumulated over five years does not. If reviews have gone quiet, fix that before you nominate.

The nomination form is not a press release. Editors respond to a specific feature, a specific date, and one clear reason the app matters this month.

What happens to downloads after featuring?

The payoff is real and very unevenly distributed. A 30-day study of App of the Day placements found downloads rose by an average of 1,747 percent for apps and 792 percent for games.³ Broader placements move less. Apps appearing in Stories and Lists saw median download growth of about 200 percent.⁴ Across more than 3,000 featuring instances in five countries, the median increase was 80 percent, and many apps cleared 500 percent.⁵

These come from separate studies, different years and different placement types, so read the bars as four data points rather than one ladder. The distribution is the lesson. A median near 80 percent⁵ sitting alongside a top-slot average near 1,747 percent³ means most featuring is a useful bump, and a small number of placements are a business event.

Scale is why even the median is worth chasing. Apps were downloaded 36.6 billion times globally in 2025, and iOS consumer spending reached 117.6 billion dollars.² A double-digit lift against a base that size still changes a quarter.

Prepare for the spike before it arrives

Featured traffic is cold, high volume and short lived. Three things should be settled before the placement runs: onboarding that works for a user with no prior context, server headroom for a single-day multiple of normal load, and a review prompt that fires after a genuine success moment so the ratings signal compounds instead of collapsing.

Does ASO help you get featured on the App Store, or is it separate?

They are separate acquisition mechanisms with one shared dependency: the product page. App Store Optimization earns you search traffic, featuring earns you browse traffic, and both land on the same screenshots, subtitle and description. Nearly 65 percent of App Store downloads happen after a search, and more than 70 percent of visitors use search to discover apps.⁷ Page-view-to-install conversion runs at about 33.7 percent overall.⁷ Apple Search Ads, where purchase intent is highest, converted at 66.2 percent on average in 2025.⁶

The practical order of operations runs the opposite way from most launch plans. Fix conversion, then pitch. Featured traffic is measured, and our read, drawn from how placements rotate rather than from published policy, is that a spike landing on a page that converts below its category norm is the fastest way out of rotation. The first screenshot has to carry the value proposition with no caption and no query context, because a browse-driven visitor arrives knowing nothing about you.

The page work itself is ordinary conversion discipline, the same set of decisions covered in our guide to improving mobile conversion. If the launch also depends on discovery away from the store, the structural habit is the one behind optimizing a site for voice search: answer the question in the first line. Both belong in the same plan as the rest of your digital marketing work rather than in a separate app silo.

How do you write a nomination an editor will act on?

Specificity beats adjectives every time. A nomination that reads well has five parts and fits in a few hundred words.

1. The moment and the date. What ships, and when, stated plainly.
2. The one new thing. A single capability, described so an editor can find it in the build inside a minute.
3. Why now. The seasonal, cultural or platform reason this belongs in a collection Apple is already assembling.
4. Who it is for. A named kind of person, not a market segment.
5. Platform proof. Widgets, Live Activities, Apple Watch, accessibility work, localized storefronts. Evidence you built for the platform rather than ported to it.

The difference shows up line by line. Bracketed values below are placeholders for your own numbers.

Seasonal and event-tied nominations attract disproportionate editorial attention for a structural reason: they slot into collections Apple is already building. If your update can honestly be framed against a moment on the calendar, frame it that way. If it cannot, do not invent one, because a forced hook reads as a forced hook.

What if the nomination goes nowhere?

Most nominations do not become placements, and you will usually not be told why. Treat that as a scheduling outcome rather than a verdict on the app. Apple’s own lead time guidance implies calendars set well before ship dates,¹ which means a strong app can miss simply because the slot it fitted was committed before you submitted.

Resubmitting is the accepted path, with one condition: the next nomination has to cover a materially different moment, not the same pitch reworded. That reframes the cadence of a whole year. Instead of one annual pitch, you get a nomination on every meaningful release and every in-app event, each with its own date and its own reason to exist. Small teams gain the most from this, because the criteria reward craft, platform fluency and care, none of which are budget-limited.

Build the calendar backwards from the release plan: dates first, then the nomination text, then the product page changes that have to land before the traffic does. Two nominations a year, written well and submitted early, will do more than a year of pitching after the fact. If you want a second pair of eyes on that sequence, talk to our team.

Written by the group's editorial team with the practice leads who run these builds. Reviewed before publish. Spotted an error? Tell us and we will fix it.