How Is ASO Different on the App Store vs Google Play?

Most ASO advice treats the two stores as one subject with minor differences. They are closer to two separate products that happen to list the same app, and the difference starts with how much text each one reads.

Apple indexes about 160 characters of metadata and Google Play about 4,110, per the two platforms’ own published field limits. Every practical disagreement between the two, from where keywords go to whether your description matters for search, comes out of that gap.

Is ASO the same on the App Store and Google Play?

ASO is not the same on the two stores, and the part that differs is the part that decides rankings. Both stores reward downloads, retention and ratings, but they read completely different text to decide which apps a search query should return.

Apple’s searchable index is built from three fields: the app name at 30 characters, the subtitle at 30 characters, and a keyword field at 100 characters that readers never see. The 4,000-character description is not indexed for iOS search. Google Play has no keyword field at all. It indexes the 30-character title, the 80-character short description and the full 4,000-character description, per Google Play Console Help.

That single structural difference inverts the writing job. On iOS, the description is sales copy for a human and the keyword work happens in a hidden field. On Play, the description is both at once, and a description written purely as sales copy leaves ranking on the table.

The second difference is repetition. On iOS, repeating a term across the name, subtitle and keyword field adds no ranking weight, so each of the 160 characters should be unique. On Play, a term used naturally more than once in the description is normal and does no harm, which is why the same keyword list produces two quite different drafts.

Treat them as two briefs with one product in common. The conversion assets, meaning the icon, the first three screenshots and the rating, matter on both, and they are where we would start on either store. The text work is where the two diverge, and copying an iOS listing into Play Console is the most common way to publish a listing that ranks for nothing.

What text does each store index for search?

Each store indexes a different set of fields, and the character budget is the clearest way to see it. The table below is the whole technical disagreement in one place.

Field	App Store	Google Play
App name or title	30 characters, indexed	30 characters, indexed
Subtitle	30 characters, indexed	Not available
Short description	Not available	80 characters, indexed
Keyword field	100 characters, indexed, hidden	Not available
Long description	4,000 characters, not indexed for search	4,000 characters, indexed
Total indexed text	About 160 characters	About 4,110 characters

The limits above come from the App Store Connect field reference, compiled in AppStyle’s 2026 character limit reference, and from Google Play Console Help. Google reduced the Play title from 50 characters to 30 in 2021, which is why older ASO guides still show the longer limit.

The practical consequence of a 100-character budget is that single words beat phrases. Apple builds phrases by combining your keywords with the name and subtitle, so “workout”, “tracker” and “gym” cover more queries than “gym workout tracker” does.

Separate them with commas and no spaces, because a space costs a character you could have spent on a word. Then paste the finished set into App Store Connect and check it is accepted, rather than counting in a text editor, because a localised set can overflow where the English one fits.

Where do downloads come from on each store?

Search is the largest single source on both stores, but it is a bigger share of iOS. Between 65% and 70% of App Store downloads begin with a search query, against roughly 60% on Google Play, per Searchlab’s compiled data reported in Webtonic’s 2026 App Store Optimization statistics. Those figures are vendor compilations rather than numbers Apple or Google publish, so read them as directional.

The reporting is where teams get misled. Google Play Console splits acquisition into Search and Explore, and Explore is not the browsing-only channel it sounds like. AppTweak reports that from 20 February 2023 Google began attributing category searches, meaning queries like “racing games” that name a type of app rather than a specific one, to Explore instead of Search. Navigational searches for an app name stayed where they were.

So a Play listing can show a modest Search share while most of its installs still came from someone typing something. Read the two numbers as one before concluding that keywords do not work on Android.

And treat a Search share that dropped in early 2023 and never came back as that reclassification turning up in your own console rather than as a ranking you lost, because the split is a reporting convention rather than a description of what users did.

How do you do keyword research for Play with no keyword field?

Start from the same keyword list you would build for iOS, then write it into three places that Play actually reads: the 30-character title, the 80-character short description and the opening lines of the long description. The research does not change between the stores. The placement changes completely.

Rank the list before writing. One term goes in the title, because 30 characters is the strongest surface on a Play listing.

Two or three go in the short description, which is the text a reader sees before expanding anything, so it has to read like a sentence a person would write. The rest go into the opening paragraphs of the long description, which is the part a reader sees before tapping to expand it.

Write the description as prose, not as a keyword list. Google’s own store listing best practices push towards text that explains the app to a person, and a description stuffed to a target density reads badly to the reader who decides whether to install. The conversion loss is immediate and the ranking gain is speculative.

The harder discipline is resisting iOS habits. Keyword phrases built for Apple’s combination engine, written as comma lists, look like spam in a Play description. Rewrite them as sentences. If you cannot get a term into a sentence a human would read, it probably does not belong on the listing.

For the full build order on a listing, from icon through to screenshots and localisation, our longer piece on how to optimise an app for the App Store and Google Play covers both stores step by step.

Do ratings, reviews and conversion rate work the same way?

Ratings and conversion rate carry weight on both stores, and on both stores the keyword surface is the listing text rather than anything a user writes. AppFollow’s ASO guidance describes Google Play as evaluating the indexable text in the title, the short description and the long description, and as applying semantic matching, so related terms and search intent count for more than repeating one phrase.

The widely repeated claim that Play ranks you on the words inside your reviews is not something either platform confirms, and we would not build a plan on it. The cheap version of the idea works anyway: prompt for a review after the user reaches the moment the app actually does its job, and read what comes back as keyword research for both listings.

Conversion rate is the signal both stores agree on. An app that converts a higher share of the people who see its listing earns better placement, which brings more impressions, which compounds. This is why the first three screenshots are worth more attention than the keyword field on either store, and why the screenshots are the asset we test first.

A new app with no ratings has a specific version of this problem, because the conversion signal and the social proof are both missing at once. That case is covered separately in how to do ASO for a new app with no reviews or rankings.

Rating recovery is slower than most teams expect on both stores. Once an app has a large rating count behind it, a run of good reviews moves the visible average slowly, which is arithmetic rather than algorithm, so the cheaper lever is fixing whatever produced the one-star reviews rather than trying to outrun them with volume.

Which store should you optimise first?

Optimise the store your paid traffic already lands on, and for most US consumer apps that is iOS, because that is where the spending is. The App Store took about $117 billion from consumers in 2025 against $49.2 billion on Google Play, per Business of Apps.

If the objective is install volume, or the market is Android-first, Play comes first and the order of work inside the listing changes with it.

Two sequencing rules hold whichever store you start with. Fix conversion before search, because ranking improvements multiply a conversion rate you have not measured. And test on whichever store sends you enough traffic to read a result, then port the winner rather than running two underpowered tests at once.

The bigger mistake is treating ASO as the acquisition plan rather than the thing that makes acquisition cheaper. Organic store search rarely launches an app on its own, because a listing nobody searches for by name has no query to rank against. Paid social and creator content create the branded search that ASO then converts, which is the sequence we run when we take an app launch end to end.

If downloads are the problem rather than the ranking, the diagnosis usually sits upstream of the listing. Our piece on why an app is not getting downloads works through the demand side of that question.

The short version

The two stores index different text, and that is the whole difference. Apple reads a 30-character name, a 30-character subtitle and a hidden 100-character keyword field, about 160 characters in total, and does not index the iOS description for search. Google Play reads a 30-character title, an 80-character short description and the full 4,000-character description, about 4,110 characters, per Google Play Console Help and the App Store Connect field reference.

That inverts the writing job. On iOS, use unique single words in the keyword field and never repeat a term already in the name or subtitle.

On Play, write the same keywords into the title, the short description and the opening paragraphs of the long description as sentences a person would read. Read Play Console’s Search and Explore numbers together, because category searches have counted as Explore since 20 February 2023 per AppTweak.

Then let the money decide the order. The App Store took about $117 billion in consumer spending in 2025 against $49.2 billion on Google Play, per Business of Apps, which is why a US consumer app usually fixes its iOS listing before its Play listing. Test on whichever store gives you the traffic to read a result, and fix the first three screenshots on both before you touch a keyword.