| Source | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFLZZ023Cac |
|---|---|
| Readwise URL | https://read.readwise.io/read/01kty53kxwqc4h3ms58g332w88 |
| Readwise ID | 01kty53kxwqc4h3ms58g332w88 |
| Date | 2026-02-03 |
| Author | App Masters |
| Category | video |
| Cover image | https://i.ytimg.com/vi/CFLZZ023Cac/sddefault.jpg |
Coming up, App Advice just shut down fortunately and what that means for [music] apps gone free campaigns and should you still be running them? Stay tuned. [music] What is up app nation? It is CP Young, founder of appmasters.com. And today I’m going to tell you the future of these lifetime freeze of these apps gone free campaigns given the news that app advice
is no longer around. So if you missed the news, here it is. On January 23rd, so just a few days ago, Appvice publicly announced that they are shutting down. And this is the app’s gone free. Twitter handle and then app advice Twitter handle as well. Now App Advice was much more than this Appscon gone free campaign. They were a media company
publication. They did app reviews and unfortunately I don’t think this has anything to do with any of Apple’s cracking down on these campaigns. All right. I have no insider information, but this is my really educated, let’s say, well-informed guess that it has nothing to do with Apple cracking down on any of these promos. All right, so there’s been this discussion and I know some other YouTubers have talked
about this and like him, I won’t name names, but Apple is cracking down on apps gone free method. Now, I’ll tell you exactly why. I recorded a video earlier telling you it’s mainly because it’s my fault, but it’s mainly because of reviews, and I’ll tell you exactly why it’s still triggering other things, right? But there’s been a crackdown on this. So, just keep that in mind. Now, people have already said they don’t use it, but this is the problem. Discoverability is poor, right? This was a Reddit thread that I found and they
were talking about this. This person has never done it, but discoverability is so poor. Right now, it’s really hard to get any type of discoverability because there’s so many stinking apps out there. Here’s one chart that was shared in our app founders community and they were just talking about look in February 2025 look at the release of Agentic Coding. Just look at the number of apps that are released per month. Per month on iOS US
only. Okay, this is year-over-year and this is each month the trailing 12 months. You can see there’s just been this huge growth. This is what Apple is trying to fight against, right? And there because of the explosion of new apps, they have to crack down and make sure we’re not doing anything funky with these type of campaigns. So, I blame myself because I recorded this video and I said, "Hey, this is the greatest
growth hack in the world. It’s the fastest way to a six-figure business because we did it right. I said, “Hey, do this exact sequence.” The problem is our platform has grown, people do it, and Apple catches on and Apple thinks we’re doing something shady. We’re not. We ran on App Advice or India App Santa. We’d make a lifetime free campaign. This is what happened to one of our clients in January of 2024. We did 106,000 downloads and because we
were asking for a review right after somebody gets that lifetime free offer. Makes sense, right? We’re giving away a lifetime free. We’re just asking, we’re not making you. We’re just asking for a review. If you want to leave a positive one, go ahead and do it. And so that’s what this client did. We got 800 new ratings, 200 in the US, 600 worldwide, right? Cuz it works. And it hacked the algorithm. Now we’re able to generate $7,000 within its first month. And we
went on to make $90,000 within this first year because of this lifetime free campaign. That’s the power. Does it always look like this? No. But Apple, are we really doing anything shady here? Right? We’re giving away something free. This is what businesses do. Come into my restaurant, I’m going to give you freebies. Literally, you go to Costco, you get all these samples because they want you to buy the whole product. This is something similar. Get And yes, we
are giving away a lifetime free offer, but we’re exchanging it to hopefully kickstart our app. Why? Because let’s go back to this Twitter thing. Discoverability is poor, right? It’s bad. An Apple feature is not even as cool in terms of downloads as it was in 2017 when we were getting tons of apps featured. I don’t even tell clients to try to get a feature anymore because it won’t do diddly squat and it’s so hard
to get. All right, so look, this campaign I blame myself. I was trying to share good content with you guys and hopefully have you kickstart your app. Now, a lot of you have already reported back it has. These lifetime promos work, right? So, now I say don’t ask for a review. Okay? I’ll go through the dos and don’ts later on, but these are recent tweets from people who are still doing these campaigns through our platform in the app Santa. Right? This
is January 20th before days before App Advice was to shut down. Pavville, thank you, Pavville, for doing this. I appreciate you so much, bro. He did this on India app Santa for his app. He got 2,000 premium users in one day, 100 reviews, all removed by Apple. So I said, “Don’t ask for it. I’ll tell you when to ask for it now.” And post feature baseline 30 organic installs and growing. So that’s what happened, right? His ASO kicked in because of the I don’t
know how many downloads he got because of the downloads he got. The ASO kicked in and helped him with his organic downloads. All right, that’s why it’s still interesting and that’s why it still works. I’ll give you more. Rudy, old friend of mine, we helped him way back in the day. He ran the same campaign January 20th. He tweeted this out on January 11th on India Appana. I’m giving you real time info, ladies and gentlemen. This is of 2026, okay? The total downloads were close to 6,000. He
normally gets 200. So awesome. And then most of the downloads came from Germany and Austria, right? And this is to help him boost his organic rankings and hopefully those who missed out on the deal will if you got a great app, this is what we’ve seen, it will help increase revenues. So, thank you to Rudy. Thank you for Pavville for still believing in this campaign and knowing that it still does work. So, let me give you the dos and don’ts of this particular campaign. The dues do run
after an ASO update. It helps. We did this for Rudy Geometry Solver back in 2020 of August. It drove 11,000 downloads. This is all publicly shared in previous videos. It drove close to 12,000 downloads. And you can see, look, post the feature, we were getting more organics, right? It led to $700 in sales. And I’ll show you why we did that. But we made one of the inapp purchases for free while we kept the other one paid. So, we made remove ads
for free. and the full version that unlocked all these other features still became paid. And so people came in for free fries as an example and bought other things instead. So that’s the idea, right? Wasn’t a lifetime free. It was just a remove ads and app purchase. But here’s what happened. Rudy was able to get so many back links because sites like ours, Indie App Santa, and App Advice, we have other deal sites following us. That’s the whole reason I
decided to buy Indie App Santa. The distribution wasn’t the app alone. It was social media. Because these deal sites followed App Advice, Rudy was able to get a lot of back links to his actual app store link. What happened? He started ranking number one on Google for Geometry Solver and he was able to drive downloads that way as well. That’s what happened with this app advice campaign. Right? This is how he was able to go from like 50 downloads a day to 200
downloads a day because of Google. All right. Now, the other thing you can do if you really want to be sophisticated is just not use an AP at all, right? Say, "Hey, here’s early premium access, lifetime free for you. All you got to do is input your email or sign up and you as a developer on the back end give away the lifetime free. No inapp purchases, no nothing. So you can do it on the back
end and that won’t signal anything to Apple. All right. The other way, this is a tougher way but easier from a marketing person is to use an offer code. I’ll create another video to kind of break down how to do that because it’s going to be boring, but I’ll show you how to do that in a later time, but you can do that if you have a lifetime. You can go in here and create an offer code. Here’s how an offer code will work. This is one of our clients that did utilize this offer code. Sent an email, claim 50% off, right? You can do
on lifetime. You can make lifetime free. You can do it on yearly subscriptions. So, you can do this through email. Sent an email. If I don’t have the app, it’ll help. It’ll make me download the app. Once I have, if I do have the app, it’ll show me this screen where I can redeem this offer one year for just 120. I hit redeem and then it will make me pay. Now, the downside to this campaign is I did this on Reddit just to test it, right? There’s a Reddit community. You guys know about it. I
said, “Hey, lifetime free. Use this link. You have to use this link.” The downside is you’re going to have to program it to know because most people if you’d run this campaign do not have the app. So they’ll have to download it and unlock your lifetime free through Apple subscription. Now your app has to know that this person has the lifetime free offer. So do not show them the payw wall. Unfortunately hard lesson learned for our app. We were still showing the payw
wall to everybody even though they had lifetime free for our app. So, not the best way of doing it. I actually would prefer to do it this way on the back end. All right, that’s just harder to detect from Apple. All right, here’s still some of the benefits of this ASO boost. You saw it in the most recent tweet from Pavle. Build back links. You saw it with Rudy’s case study. Early adoption and feedback. I literally get this all the time. Every time I run it
with one of our apps, people have emailed me and asked, “Hey, do you have this mode or this feature?” And I’m like, “No, never considered it, but thank you for sending it. We will send it. We will try to build it.” Right? That’s the benefit still. Now, here are the don’ts. All right? If you don’t want to get in trouble with Apple, really follow this, okay? Do not ask for a review anymore. That was my fault. I said, "Ask for a review. You’re giving away a lifetime free. Why not just ask for a review? We’re not making
you leave a review. We’re just asking. Okay. Apple doesn’t like it. Fair. Apple, you control everything, so we’ll abide. Now, here’s why Apple’s been sending these emails. You get a huge boost in downloads. Check. You get a huge boost in AP, inapp purchases for short, that are free for crying out loud. So, Apple sees that in their system. and you get a huge boost in reviews. So, Apple’s now saying, "Hey, you’re doing something fishy, right? The
people are getting things for free and you’re manipulating my review system, my treasured review system." So, just don’t ask for the reviews. They’re not going to care about the other things. They haven’t cared since 2010, since 2013. Ever since I’ve been running this campaigns, they’ve never cared of the first two. It’s just when I decided to add the third one is when they started really caring, right? Because if they truly cared, they wouldn’t allow us to make any APS free. We’ll have to do it all on the back end, which you know, any
SAS provider wants to do. I think they should do it, right? Revenue gap might allow us to do it easily. So something to consider, but this is why I feel like developers are getting email because of these three things. All right. Again, you see Pavle, even though he asked for a review, I’m sure he asked for it early on. I don’t know exactly when he asked for it, so why don’t I just say that, but he got a 100 reviews. Apple’s just starting to remove it now versus keeping them because he’s like, “Look, you got a spike. We don’t want to do that.” Okay? So, keep it chill. All right. Here’s the
bright way to ask for a review. This has worked for many clients and there’s a secret one that I’ve shared in our founders community that I refuse to share publicly because it will stop working. Okay, here it is. So, routinery did this. This is their onboarding. Super basic. I won’t spend too much time there, but I’ll put a link to this app breakdown. Anyways, so here’s their payw wall. You can see that you hit X. You hit X on the payw wall, they take you right to their first routine, what they
call routine. That routine involves, you know, checking your schedule, meditating, all that stuff. And so, as I start doing my first routine, and I’m done, and I’ve meditated, I’ve gotten this seed. That’s so cool. How was your routine? blah blah blah blah. Boom. Ask for a review. That’s when you’re going to do it, right? So, you can still do it during your lifetime free campaign, apps gone free campaign, but you really want to do it to engage users versus everybody. This will cause less reviews,
but the good news is it should not trigger anything within Apple because these are engaged users. So, you’re just going to get way less reviews from a downloads perspective. when we did ask for it right on onboarding right after the payw wall we saw 1% of the downloads leaving a review this will probably lead to about 0.1 to.5% of the downloads leaving a review so easy math out there 10,000 downloads will likely get you about 10 to 50 right all right so a lot
less but at least Apple won’t be triggered by these reviews because that’s how I try to that’s how I came up with these reviews idea I know that 1% of the downloads will leave a review if I asked for it during the onboarding. So, I said, “How do I get to 10,000 downloads really fast?” Because I wanted to get to 100 reviews really fast. Hence, this idea that no longer works. Hey, worked like a charm for 3 plus years. All right, that is it. [music]
Now, if you are still interested in [music] distributing your app on Indie App Santa and kickstarting your app, go check it out. Indie apps santa.com. We got a great promo cuz Appvice, the good news, I always told people this. Appvice is free to run. Fortunately, they’re no longer around. you’re going to have to pay, but we’ve got a steep discount [music] for everyone that wants to get involved because look, I love those guys from App Advice. I’ve told
every client, try it on App Advice first. You don’t have to pay us at Indie App Santa. Only after Appevice, you come to Indie [music] App Santa because you can’t run it too many times on App Advice. But to thank all the developers who have been doing these campaigns on Reddit, on App Advice, if you want to leverage another platform using Dapp [music] Santa, we got a great promo going on right now that’s going to give you a steep discount on just those features alone to help you kickstart [music] your app to help you solve one
of the hardest equations of app growth of any business growth [music] and that is distribution. All right, trying to make it super affordable for you guys. I don’t know how long this offer is going to last, but go check it out. indie apps.com. [music] And stay subscribed to this YouTube channel if you want the latest, greatest growth hacking ways of growing app downloads. If you want the boringest, go check out those other channels. If you want something that’s going to inspire you to think different, then this is the
channel for you. All right, until next time. I’ll see you on the next video.