An app I built was featured by Apple. You cannot download it today.

An app I built called Supérette was featured by Apple. You cannot download it today.

Both of those sentences are true, and the second one is why I am writing this. Someone asks me how to get featured every few months, usually in the same conversation where we are working out what their app should cost. It is a fair question with an answer people do not especially enjoy.

What a feature is worth, in numbers

Sensor Tower measured this properly after the iOS 11 App Store redesign. Median US iPhone downloads for the week after a placement, against the week before: Game of the Day over 800%, App of the Day over 685%, and the Stories and Lists formats around 200%. A hero banner on the Games tab was worth 236%, and on the Apps tab 111%.

An earlier Sensor Tower analysis, reported a few months before that one, put App of the Day at 1,747% for apps and 792% for games. The distance between 685 and 1,747 is a good reason to read the method before quoting the headline. Different samples, different windows, and a median is not an average.

The safe reading is that a strong placement multiplies your downloads several times over for roughly a week, with most of it landing in the first day or two. That is a real number and I would take it any day. It is also a week.

In 2010 that week was the entire game

When Supérette went out, the store held somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000 apps. Discovery meant New & Noteworthy, What's Hot, Staff Favorites, and whichever banner Apple felt like rotating. Search existed and was poor enough that Apple bought Chomp in 2012 to go and fix it.

Being featured then was not a channel. It was the channel. Markus Müller of MindNode described launch featuring on the Mac App Store as half a million downloads in the first few days, which is the kind of sentence that stops being possible once a store gets crowded enough.

Apple's own figures today are that 70% of App Store visitors use search to find apps, and almost 65% of downloads happen right after a search. The store now holds about 2.56 million apps. Featuring did not get weaker. Everything standing around it got very much bigger.

The arithmetic almost nobody does

Apple's Today tab runs six pieces of original editorial content a day, and there is an App of the Day and a Game of the Day on top of that.

Set that against the supply. iOS took nearly 560,000 new apps in the first half of 2026 alone and is on pace to pass a million for the full year.

I am not going to dress that division up as a probability. Slots repeat, plenty of them go to apps that have been out for years, and an editorial calendar is not a raffle. But the shape of it is right, and the shape says featuring is not a plan. If the growth model for your app contains the words "and then we get featured", there is no growth model.

The complaint that got fixed while nobody was looking

This is the part I find genuinely interesting, and it is the reason this article exists at all.

In 2012, MacStories asked a group of developers what was wrong with App Store discovery. Rich Siegel of Bare Bones Software gave the answer everyone gave for years: developers have no direct input into what gets featured. You built the thing, you shipped it, and then you waited to see whether Apple noticed. Featuring was weather.

That stopped being true in 2024, when Apple added Featuring Nominations to App Store Connect. You fill in a form. You say whether you are nominating a new app launch, an enhancement to an existing app, or new content. Apple asks for two weeks of notice as a floor and suggests up to three months for wider consideration.

So the single most repeated complaint about App Store featuring, the one developers made for over a decade, was quietly answered. And most of the developers I speak to still talk about featuring the way they did in 2012.

It is free and it takes about twenty minutes. I have no idea what the hit rate is, and nobody outside Apple does either. The rate on forms you never submit is easier to establish.

Five criteria you can argue about, two you can simply do

Apple publishes what its editors weigh: user experience, UI design, innovation, uniqueness, accessibility, localization, and the product page, which explicitly includes your ratings and reviews.

Read that list as the person building the app rather than the person marketing it, and it splits cleanly in two.

• Five of them are judgments. You cannot decide to be innovative, and you cannot decide that your interface is good. You can try, and then somebody else rules on whether you managed it.
• Two of them are just work. Accessibility and localization are not opinions about your app. Either you did them or you did not, and a reviewer can establish which in about a minute.

That asymmetry is the most useful thing on Apple's page and I almost never see anyone act on it. VoiceOver labels that make sense, a layout that survives the largest Dynamic Type setting, strings translated by someone who speaks the language: none of that requires talent, only a decision. It is also exactly the work that gets cut first when a schedule slips, which is how it ends up being a differentiator.

What the spike is actually for

I wrote a few days ago that the App Store does not reward old apps, it rewards apps that have been accumulating, and that the accumulation only starts on the day you ship.

Featuring is the one free lever that compresses that clock. A week at several times your usual volume deposits downloads, and downloads turn into ratings at whatever rate your prompt converts. Since iOS 11 those ratings never reset. The same week builds the install base that retention and review velocity are then measured against, and both of those are ranking signals you cannot fake from a standing start.

So the spike is worth having precisely because of what it leaves behind after it fades. The week itself is a nice week.

If it happens, be ready to catch it

• Have the rating prompt live before the placement rather than after it. That week is the largest batch of first-run users you are ever going to get at once, and it does not come round again.
• Ship nothing risky that week. A launch crash during your one week of real traffic turns a feature into a stack of one-star reviews that will outlast it by years.
• Fix the product page first. Apple counts it as one of the seven, and every visitor who bounces off your screenshots is attention you were handed for free and threw away.
• Watch retention rather than the download counter. The counter comes back down on its own. Whether anybody stayed is the only part still visible in a month.

Back to Supérette

Supérette was featured. It is not on the store now. There is no contradiction in those two facts sitting next to each other, and I think that is the useful thing to take away.

A feature is a reward for having done a particular kind of work, and it buys you a very good week. It is not distribution, it is not evidence that you built the right thing, and it will not hold up an app with nothing underneath it. Build the thing properly and then ask for the feature. Building the thing in order to get the feature is the wrong way round.