I'm not sure I agree entirely on the press thing - although my experiences are from owning a mobile game company, not a mobile app company. For games, online press is great to start to be recognized within the community of peer groups/companies, but has never moved the needle for us, user-wise.

We haven't been featured either, but that's made things harder on us. Getting featured is still huge for visibility. We're pressing for it pretty hard when we release our next game. It's 90% likely we won't get one, but its a huge win if you can pull it off. (It does increase the already silly graph of first-week downloads vs. the-rest-of-time-ever downloads, but it definitely makes sure that second part averages a bit higher.)