Avoid being featured in the App Store at launch: your app will likely have issues and first-time users won't give you a second chance
Avoid the Feature — Early on, all those downloads are not your friend — It's right there, like a glittering lure in a dark sea. An email from Apple.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is developer-side folklore from inside Apple's walled garden: a veteran arguing that an App Store feature at launch is a trap, because a download surge hits before an app is hardened and first-time users don't come back. It lands in the middle of a stretch of coverage questioning what the App Store actually does for developers — from the neglected Mac App Store, hobbled by stringent requirements and missing tools like TestFlight, to later documentation of how developers game discovery instead.
The through-line is that Apple's curation is pitched as a service to developers but often behaves like a bottleneck: by the time Apple made Sign In with Apple mandatory and critics read it as brute force, and when observers concluded the store wins traffic mainly because it's the only choice, the 'feature as reward' model was already looking fragile.
First-order effects
- Developers launching new apps face a direct trade-off: accepting a feature means absorbing a wave of downloads while the app is least stable, burning first impressions that the author says users won't give back.
- Apple's editorial team effectively holds a double-edged lever — the same featuring slot that signals quality can punish the app that earns it too early.
Second-order effects
- If organic featuring is risky or arbitrary, developers rationally shift to manipulative discovery tactics — the keyword-stuffed names, subscription tricks, and purchased ratings documented in later coverage of how iOS developers game the App Store.
- Apple's own pitch that the store offers exceptional marketing weakens: as the related analysis put it, users come because it's the only choice, not because the distribution is genuinely better — which pushes developer goodwill toward regulators and rivals scrutinizing the store's cut.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, App Store curation stops functioning as a meritocracy developers aspire to and hardens into pure gatekeeping power — the dynamic behind the Sign In with Apple backlash — inviting antitrust-style scrutiny of whether Apple's storefront serves developers or merely taxes them.
The trend: Platform storefronts are drifting from curated discovery services toward contested gatekeeper positions, where even the perks they offer developers can read as risks.