Being Featured on the App Store

I've spent a LOT of time thinking about how to get featured and how the whole mess works, and as for my experience, my first feature was simply based on being a new idea (TextPics was the first app for ASCII art texting - before I experienced Attack of the Chinese Clones) with excellent growth, lots of updates, and a positive rating. These three points were actually laid out on Apple's developer portal and TextPics satisfied all the points and was lucky enough to be chosen.

The second time around I specifically made a move with the aim of getting featured - I made a Christmas edition update. I changed the icon (put a Santa hat on the bunny), the loading screen, and new content was almost exclusively holiday pics. Apple appears to put Christmas features on the main feature page, rather than a sub-page like our Valentines edition. Lucky me, my plan actually worked.

And although it did not matter for us from a server standpoint, Apple did actually contact us before the first featuring asking for artwork and assets. I assume we were in line to be one of the few apps featured so prominently in the hero section, but that did not end up happening.

Every feature for us started on a Thursday, lasted one week, and then moved to the What Hot section for another week.

Between being featured multiple times and being at the top of the app store multiple times I learned a hell of a lot about app store customers, apps store sales dynamics, ratings, and everything else App Store related, though beyond "make a great app and update it often" I can't think of what else can help other apps get featured.

I'd be happy to answer any questions anyone has, as I know first hand what a mystery the whole process can be.

  (\(\ TextPics :)
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We're a small company and our app Opuss (opuss.com) was app of the week for UK/Ireland. While we were contacted in regards to "brick" sized artwork, we had no such expectation and just dutifully provided what they requested.

For the next 4 weeks we got a nervous twitch each Thursday around 5PM GMT (about an hour before 10am Cupertino) as it can also set a precedent for other stores. (In our case the Nordics and Germany as well). If your server logs look fishy around this time and you have EC2 or equivalent, fire up a few extra servers for those few hours. Trust me.

Best tip of them all. Deal with user support requests trough email so they won't get back at you with bad reviews. Seems obvious, but lots of devs don't do it.

Care to elaborate on the details?

Are you using someone else's service or you built your own?

Why did you decide to provide 2 feeback mechanisms - email and in-app?

I see the value of user feeback, but isn't it quite burdensome?

We've also had an experience were we were asked to provide assets and graphics 'incase' we were featured that week, but ended up not being featured at all (phototreats). The process is a mystery, but one thing that seems common is that almost all apps that are featured have great beautiful, easy to use design.

My first app, Foodmatic, actually got featured in New & Noteworthy as well when it launched. Unfortunately, sales fell off as soon as the feature ended and the app was kind of a failure haha. But no doubt getting featured can be a huge factor in the success of an app.