ASO Timeline – See other apps’ metadata updates

If you’ve been doing ASO for a while, you probably know that a good practice is to regularly update your app. Changing your app’s subtitle from time to time, or giving your app’s icon a seasonal touch are a good way to show (both to users and to the store algorithms) that you are constantly working on your app. However, keeping track of all these changes can become quite fastidious, that’s why we’ve developed the ASO Timeline! AppTweak automatically tracks all the updates of any followed app and shows the changes made over time.

Keeping track of your app’s updates

Whether you’re the only one working on the ASO of your app, or you’re part of a whole ASO department, keeping track of all the changes submitted to the store over the year can become quite tricky.

On AppTweak, we automatically detect when a change was made to an app’s metadata, when it went live and what elements of the app were affected.

AppTweak indicates when your app was updated and which metadata elements were affected.

If you select a particular change in time, AppTweak indicates which elements were changed and shows their previous vs. new version to facilitate comparison. You can also activate the diff button to have the changes highlighted.

AppTweak highlights the differences between two app versions of TikTok (IOS US)

Monitoring your competitors’ updates

Our app store Timeline also works for any competitor you are following. This can be very helpful to detect when a competitor made his latest update, or to get an idea of how frequently his apps are updated.

Check how frequently your competitors update their apps and which changes they make

For a more focused view, you can select which competitors and which metadata elements you wish to study. For example, you can choose to see only the visual updates (icon, screenshots and videos) made to your competitors.

Filter the app store timeline by competitor and metadata element for a focused view.

If you want to have a better idea of the changes made by an app on a specific date, you can click on the update to see its details and compare the versions before and after the update. To make things even easier to compare, we’ve enabled a diff button that highlights the changes between the two versions.

Check the differences between two versions of an app using AppTweak’s diff tool. Example of InShot’s subtitle update (iOS – US).

To further illustrate, we did a quick study of how gaming apps updated their icons according to seasonal events using our ASO Timeline.

Study of popular games’ icon updates just before Halloween (iOS US)

Study any app’s metadata history

The app store timeline is a great asset to better understand your competitors’ strategy. Using the Metadata History tab, you can get the history of the any app’s metadata of your choice. We put together a list of insightful examples of how major apps updated their metadata over the past year.

In 2018, Yelp changed its title 3 times, bringing its focus on keywords like ‘local’, ‘food’ and ‘services’ (iOS – US).

Last year, Pandora made several changes to its app icon, gradually removing the blue from its brand colors (iOS US).

Expedia changed the order of its screenshot to put forward different features and promos (iOS – UK).

YouTube Music edited it’s subtitle twice, putting the focus on generic keywords instead of branded words (probably to boost their ASO).

Finally, Skybet (iOS UK) has updated its promotional text all through the year, making the most of popular sport events.

Getting your ASO one step further with the app store Timeline

We hope this article gave you lots of ideas on how to use this new feature to further improve your ASO. To summarize, the app store timeline helps you

• keep track of your own changes and when your submissions went live on the stores
• monitor how frequently your competitors update their app
• study the changes made by a competitor in his app’s metadata
• view the history of any app’s metadata & learn more about its strategy

Sign up now to get full access to this new feature!