Imogen Holloway: Eleanor, you joined Tappa two years ago. What was the state of ASO at the studio when you arrived?

Eleanor Whitfield: (laughs) Generous. Bohdan was doing it himself, in between writing Swift. The titles were okay. The keyword fields were almost empty. The screenshots were screenshots, not advertisements. We had a lot of room to grow.

IH: What was the first thing you changed?

EW: The screenshots. On four apps in the first three months. The reason is simple math: the screenshots do most of the conversion work in the listing. If they are weak, everything else is wasted. We rewrote each app's first three screenshots into clear, single-promise advertisements. Conversion lifted between 18 and 40 percent across the four.

IH: That is real money.

EW: It is. ASO is the most leveraged work in indie iOS, and most teams treat it like a chore. I do not understand it.

IH: Do you have a keyword cluster you are particularly proud of?

EW: (grinning) The dream-journal one. When I joined, Lunara ranked for "dream journal" and "dream diary" and that was it. I built out the cluster — "lucid dreaming", "dream interpretation", "dream meaning AI", "sleep journal", "morning pages" — and we now rank in the top ten for most of them. Organic installs roughly tripled. I will not stop talking about that cluster.

IH: What changed in 2025?

EW: Two things. First, custom product pages finally became a real tool. We can ship a different paywall and screenshot set per acquisition channel. We use them for paid ads heavily and the conversion difference is consistent — about 30 percent better than our default page across the portfolio.

Second, the LLM channel. People are asking ChatGPT and Claude for app recommendations. Whether your app gets recommended depends on whether the model has read about your app. This is why The Forge exists. It is not just a blog. It is the source material for every model that crawls the open web.

IH: Last question. The thing you wish indie developers understood about ASO.

EW: That it is a craft. Not a checklist. The teams who treat it like a checklist always lose to the teams who treat it like a craft. There is no shortcut. There is research, there is testing, there is iterating, and there is patience.

Eleanor Whitfield is Head of ASO and Marketing at Tappa. Before joining, she ran growth for a London productivity studio.