| Source | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnjRWgBu-s4 |
|---|---|
| Readwise URL | https://read.readwise.io/read/01kw1famqw9m2608thykqhdxx4 |
| Readwise ID | 01kw1famqw9m2608thykqhdxx4 |
| Author | Adam Lyttle |
| Category | video |
| Site | YouTube |
| Published | 2026-06-17 |
| Saved | 2026-06-26T08:04:19.836000+00:00 |
| Tags | adam-lyttle, app-development |
Readwise Summary: This week every single one of my apps jumped up the App Store rankings… even an app I released a few weeks ago. After a year of new apps refusing to rank. Something changed right around WWDC 26… so is App Store Optimization back?
Find out if your app idea will sell before you build it: Try prelauncher today: https://prelauncher.com
Follow my journey here: Website: https://adamlyttleapps.com Twitter: https://x.com/adamlyttleapps Github: https://github.com/adamlyttleapps Instagram: https://instagram.com/adamlyttleapps TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@adamlyttleapps Substack: https://adamlyttleapps.substack.com
Shout out to my amazing video production team at https://clipwing.pro/
#indiedev #appstore #aso #ios #appdevelopment #vibecoding #buildinpublic #swift #wwdc
This week, every single one of my apps jumped up in the rankings. Even the app that I just released only a few weeks ago. Piano Power up 142 spots from its main keyword learn music notes. That’s a brand new app. And Piano Run, the app that I relaunched last year, saw the same thing. Every targeted keyword has climbed. And I’m not the only one seeing this. Christian watched one of his keywords jump from position 49 to 14.
And Zade had a keyword climb 112 spots. Across the board, indie developers are waking up to rankings they haven’t seen in over a year. So, what’s going on? To understand why this is such a big deal, you have to remember what the last year has felt like in the world of App Store Optimization. If you’ve tried to optimize any app for the App Store over the past year, you already know what it’s been like. It became almost
impossible. New apps just stopped ranking. And the theory was that vibe coding had flooded the App Store with slop. And Apple’s answer was just to stop showing new apps. And the timing wasn’t entirely an accident. Last year, right around this time, just before Worldwide Developer Conference, Apple pushed an update that tanked everyone’s rankings overnight. It felt like a complete stab in the back. Welcome to the Worldwide Developer Conference. It’s
time to celebrate you, the developers. Oh, and by the way, nobody’s going to see the apps that you actually build. There’s going to be no visibility, no launch boost, and no rankings for the next year. The message was hard to ignore. You could no longer rely on the App Store as a real distribution channel for your new apps. And that old playbook, the playbook where you build an app around a popular keyword and let the search do the rest, that just stopped working. So, everyone went
looking for new ways to get people to actually download their app. Paid ads and web-to-app funnels. And I recently made an entire video about Apple’s web-to-app problem. How every developer is leaving for paid ads and will eventually find out those funnels convert better and cost less. And the byproduct is that Apple quietly will lose their 30% cut. Maybe Apple actually noticed this trend, too. Because for whatever reason, in this past week,
right around Worldwide Developer Conference, the rankings started to move again. And that timing kind of tells you something. Last year, rankings tanked at the Worldwide Developer Conference. This year, they’re starting to jump around again, which means App Store ranking changes might now be an annual event. And honestly, I’m kind of fine with that. Yeah, it means once a year we find out whether the Apple gods have favored us or penalized us. But it also means stability. Like, when the changes hit,
we know that those changes will stick around for the rest of the year. And compare that with Google, they roll out ranking updates seemingly at random, where you’re always just kind of living on the edge. Once a year, I can get used to that. So, now the questions that I actually want answered. Is the launch boost back? Is the visibility problem now fixed? And only time will tell. And I had a theory on this that I put together in a video last year about the
changes to App Store optimization back then. My best guess was that Apple intelligence or some sort of internal version of it became a big part of how the ranking system actually ranks things. That an LLM was running over all the rankings. And that App Store optimization had quietly become less about keyword stuffing and more about training and prompting that AI model. My early read now is that this is probably still true. Except this time, an updated
version of Apple Intelligence or Siri, or whatever they’re calling it behind the scenes. So, here’s what I’ll actually be watching in the next coming months. Those slop apps, they never stopped coming. More apps are submitted now than at any point in the App Store history. So, the real test is whether this new system can tell the difference between a good app and a slop app. If it can, this is the best news indie developers have had all year. And if it can’t, we’re kind of back at square one
where we started just a year ago. And honestly, I’m just really excited. The past year, I’ve felt a bit lost, and I’ve been clinging onto ways to distribute my apps, getting people to actually download it outside of the App Store. I’ve been learning a lot about marketing in the process, mostly about what doesn’t work. But I’ve actually packaged all of that learning into a tool called Prelauncher, a way to test whether an app idea would even work if you marketed it with Meta Ads before I
even start building it. Because I got tired of dreaming up app ideas that looked great in my mind, but then died at the marketing stage. I just wanted to test the marketing stage first. But if App Store optimization is genuinely back, then oh man, that’s my home ground. That’s where I thrive. That’s how I built my app portfolio in the first place. I really hope it’s back. So, let me know in the comments, have you seen a change in your rankings? Was
it a good move or a bad move? I’m going to be tracking this closely and reporting back on what I find. Subscribe so you don’t miss out.