Most ASO advice treats every field as equally important. They are not. Some are indexed for search, some influence whether people tap, and some do nothing at all for discovery.
The fields that are indexed
App Store search draws on a limited set of fields, and knowing which they are stops you wasting effort:
- App name — the strongest signal you control, and the shortest. Every character spent on branding is a character not spent on a term people search.
- Subtitle — indexed, and the most under-used field on the store.
- Keyword field — 100 characters, invisible to users, indexed.
Notably absent: the description. On the App Store it is not indexed for search — unlike Google Play, where it is. Advice that tells you to stuff keywords into your description is either about the wrong store or out of date.
What the description is actually for
Conversion, not discovery. It only matters to someone already on your page deciding whether to tap Get, and most of them read only the first two lines before the fold.
Which means the first sentence is doing nearly all the work, and it should say what the app does in plain language. Ours are written as one clear claim followed by a bulleted feature list, because the list is scannable and the claim is what gets read.
Do not repeat yourself across fields
Terms already in your name or subtitle do not need to be in the keyword field — repetition adds nothing and wastes characters from your hundred. Nor do you need plurals or minor variations; the index handles those.
Separate keywords with commas and no spaces. A space costs you a character and buys nothing.
Screenshots decide the tap
The first two screenshots appear in search results, before anyone opens your page. They are doing more work than the entire description.
Screenshots with a short caption above the device frame consistently outperform raw captures, because a bare screenshot asks the viewer to work out what they are looking at. Say what the app does; do not show a screen and hope.
A practical note on pulling your own data
If you are building tooling around this, one limitation to know about: an App Store Connect API
key with the Sales role can read reports but returns 403 on metadata endpoints such as
appInfos and appStoreVersionLocalizations.
For public metadata — name, subtitle, icon, category, ratings — the unauthenticated iTunes lookup endpoint is simpler and needs no role at all. One caveat we hit in mid-2026: that endpoint returns an empty screenshot array for many apps regardless of the country parameter, so it cannot be relied on for screenshots.