Friends With Strangers

Attention iPhone Developers: Get Your App Name Right

Posted by John on October 30, 2009

I feel compelled to share the feedback I received from the iPhone Developer Program for my new iPhone app. If the information helps just one developer get approved more quickly, it will have indeed been worth it!

It will also make IDP reviewers’ jobs easier.

Currently it takes about 2.5 weeks for Apple’s iPhone application approval process, up from five days at the beginning of the year. And this is if there are no change requests. Expect equal amounts of time for each round of corrections.

So without further ado, here’s the potentially time-saving tip:

Don’t use keywords in your app name!

Unless it is your app name.

We’ve reviewed your application and determined that we cannot post this version of your iPhone application to the App Store because your app name contains keywords. iTunes Connect now supports Keywords under Manage My Applications to allow developers to establish application search criteria. Please remove all keywords from your app name and enter them in the iTunes Connect Keywords field.

If you’ll recall back in July, Apple asked developers to include a list of keywords with their newly submitted binary to improve app discovery. The current character limit for the keywords category is 100.

Prior to this, many developers added keywords to their app name “title” appearing as the app name headline in the App Store. This helped people better locate the apps they were searching for. And let’s face it. Unless (1) the name of your app (or company name) is made up of relevant keywords, (2) you’re a major brand, or (3) you’re in the top 100 overall, very few people are looking for your iPhone app by name.

After finally getting my partners’ approval and at the renewed insistence of a friend, we saw an immediate 30+% increase in daily sales for our first iPhone app, Mark On Call, simply by changing the app name and making it a “title”. People were searching for interior design, home decorating, etc., not “mark on call” (or at least there were significantly fewer queries for our product by name). While effective, it proved less aesthetic and perhaps more confusing for some customers. Cluttering the store with wordy keywords illogically strewn together, does not make for a seamless experience. So Apple’s change makes sense. Keep it simple, keep it elegant.

Without our history in the App Store (currently having version 1.3 breaking the rule and “for sale” in the App Store), we would have completely avoided this error. We had just submitted Mark On Call 2.0 prior to this notice, so it required rejecting the binary and resubmitting in order to remove keywords from our app name.

But hey. You live and learn. I only hope we don’t have to wait another two and a half weeks for App Popular’s approval.

I remain hopeful we’ll be live soon.

And iPhone developers. Please. Get your app name right.