Competitor ASO Teardown and Metadata Positioning Read

Your entire indexed metadata footprint on iOS is 160 characters: a 30-character title, a 30-character subtitle and a 100-character keyword field nobody outside your account can see. On Google Play it is around 4,110, because the long description is indexed and there is no keyword field at all. A teardown that reports the same conclusions for both stores has read neither properly. This engagement recommends and stops. Nothing is implemented under it, and the boundary is deliberate: the value of an outside read comes from being free to say the thing your agency cannot say about work it produced. What we read: Twenty-four months of version history and release notes for each competitor, which shows cadence, what they kept fixing and where they gave up on a feature. Their indexed metadata across both stores and how it has changed. Which terms they hold organically against which they are buying on Apple Search Ads, including whether anyone bids their brand name and whether they bother defending it. Category and chart position over time rather than on the day we happen to look. Ratings velocity by storefront. The pricing and paywall surface visible before install, which on most fashion and food apps is where the real conversion event sits. The screenshot read: First frame and its caption, the ordering decision, portrait against landscape, and whether a video poster earns the slot it occupies. Most store visitors never scroll past the second screenshot, so a set that puts its argument in position four is arguing with itself. We say which competitor understands this and which one is decorating. What comes back: A written document, thirty to forty pages depending on the number of competitors, and a ninety-minute call to argue with it. The document names three or four terms worth contesting, with the reasoning, and the terms to concede. Concession is the part clients push back on hardest. A term held by an incumbent with four years of ranking history, ten times your ratings volume and a paid defence is not a target, it is a tax you can decline to pay. Telling you which is which is most of what you are buying. We also write a section on what each competitor has got wrong, because it is usually the more actionable half. Metadata untouched for eighteen months. A subtitle spent on a slogan. A Play long description written for humans in a field that is indexed. A screenshot set localised badly enough that the German storefront does worse work than the British one. What we refuse: This is not a keyword export. If you want a spreadsheet of 500 terms with volume and difficulty columns, buy the tool directly; it costs a few hundred euro a month and we will tell you which one to buy. We do not sell rank guarantees. We do not tear down more than four competitors in one engagement, because past that the document stops being a judgement anyone signed and becomes a spreadsheet. We do not scrape reviewer identities or approach a competitor's customers. We do not run this monthly: a teardown is worth commissioning once or twice a year, and continuous rank tracking is a tool purchase rather than a consulting one. Who this is not for: Teams who want the recommendations executed by the people who wrote them, which is a conflict we decline. Apps in a category with fewer than three genuine competitors, where the exercise degenerates into reading one company's homework. Anyone commissioning this to settle an internal argument they have already decided, since the document will be quoted selectively and we would rather not supply the ammunition.