How Do You Market an App With No Users and No Reviews?

Launching into the App Store in 2026 means launching into a market where supply has roughly doubled and demand has not moved. That changes what a launch plan has to do: every channel now runs through a store listing competing against far more alternatives than it faced two years ago.

Sensor Tower recorded about 560,000 new apps added to the App Store in the first half of 2026, nearly matching the roughly 600,000 added across all of 2025. Downloads over the same six months rose 2%, to 17.6 billion. The practical reading is that nobody is going to find your app by accident.

Why is launching an app harder in 2026 than it was two years ago?

Launching is harder because the number of apps competing for a flat pool of downloads has roughly doubled in a year. Appfigures found that worldwide app releases rose 60% year over year in the first quarter of 2026, and 80% on iOS alone, with April releases more than doubling across both stores.

Most of that new supply is not a serious competitor to you. It does, however, compete for the same store search results, the same browse placements and the same editorial attention, and it makes every ranking signal more expensive to earn than it was when fewer apps shipped each week.

What this changes about tactics is narrow but important. Approaches that relied on being visible by default, such as ranking for a moderately competitive keyword because few apps targeted it, have mostly stopped working. Approaches that buy qualified traffic and convert it still work exactly as well as they did, because they never depended on scarcity.

It also raises the value of specificity. A general app in a crowded category has no way to describe itself that is not also true of forty others, while a narrow one can own a phrase nobody else is targeting. Our piece on why an app gets no downloads covers how concentrated store discovery has become at the top.

What do you do first when you have no users and no reviews?

What you do first is fix the store listing, before you spend a dollar on traffic, because every channel you run sends people through it. A listing that converts at 20% rather than 10% halves your cost per install on every campaign you will ever run, and you can work on it before launch day.

Write the first screenshot and the subtitle for someone who has never heard of you and has four other tabs open. State what the app does, for whom, and what changes after they use it. New apps commonly lead with the brand or a feature name, which assumes recognition that does not exist yet.

Set up measurement at the same time, because launch data you failed to capture is gone. That means a subscription platform recording trials and conversions, event tracking for onboarding and paywall views, and an attribution setup that will still make sense once you are running two channels. Doing this before launch rather than three months after is most of what makes early numbers usable.

Then pick one channel. Running four at launch produces four sets of numbers too small to read and no answer about any of them. One channel at a budget large enough to produce a few hundred installs gives you a conversion rate you can act on.

Our guide to App Store and Google Play optimisation covers the metadata and screenshot work in detail, and it is worth finishing before the first campaign goes live.

How do you get your first reviews without breaking the rules?

You get your first reviews by asking inside the app, immediately after a user has completed something that worked. Apple’s in-app review prompt and the Google Play review API both let you trigger the request at a moment you choose, and the moment is the whole game: after a first successful result, not on second launch.

Incentives are not an option. Both stores prohibit paying for, filtering or rewarding reviews, and both have pulled apps for it. Buying a rating is a listing risk, and the pattern is detectable because review timing and language cluster in ways real reviews do not.

Volume comes from how many users reach a genuine success moment and how often you are allowed to ask. That makes review generation a retention problem rather than a marketing one. An app where few users complete onboarding will not produce reviews no matter how the prompt is worded.

Reply to the early ones, including the bad ones. Developer responses are visible to everyone who reads the listing afterwards, and a specific, unbothered reply to a one-star review does more for a visitor’s confidence than three more five-star ratings.

Expect the first fifty reviews to be slow and uneven, and avoid judging the product on them. Early reviewers skew toward people with strong opinions in both directions.

Which channel gets a brand new app its first real users?

For a subscription app, paid store search is usually the cheapest first test, because the intent already exists and you are not trying to create demand. Adapty’s 2026 Apple Ads benchmarks, built on more than 8,000 apps and a million ad groups, put install-to-trial conversion on Apple Ads at 3.66%, around 2.5 times what the same dataset measured on other paid channels.

Paid social is the better first test when the problem is that nobody is searching for what you built. A new category needs demonstration rather than keyword coverage, and Meta and TikTok let you show the app working to people who did not know they wanted it. The trade is a lower conversion rate and a longer read.

Organic and community channels are worth doing and are not a test. A launch post, a subreddit, a founder’s own following and a waitlist all deliver a spike of unrepresentative traffic, which is useful for reviews and useless for working out what the app costs to acquire users for.

Channel	Best when	What it tells you in month one
Paid store search	People already search for what you built	A clean install-to-trial rate on high-intent traffic
Paid social	Nobody is searching for your category yet	Which promise makes a stranger install
Creator content you license	You need demonstration and social proof	Which demonstration converts, plus reusable ad assets
Launch posts and communities	You want free early reviews	Very little, because the audience is unrepresentative

Pick the channel that matches where the demand is, then stay on it long enough to get an answer. Four weeks at a budget that produces a few hundred installs is roughly the minimum to read a conversion rate rather than noise.

How much should you expect to pay for the first installs?

Expect the cost per install to be set by your niche far more than by your skill at media buying. Adapty’s 2026 benchmarks put the US median at $2.51 against a $0.51 median across 90 markets, and the spread across 58 sub-niches runs 30x, from $0.34 to $10.34 around a $1.43 median.

That spread is the number to plan against. A test budget that would deliver 800 installs in one niche delivers 40 in another, and 40 installs tells you nothing about conversion. Work backwards: decide how many installs you need to read install-to-trial with confidence, then multiply by your niche’s cost per install.

Cost per install is also the wrong number to optimise. The figure that decides whether the app has a business is cost per paying user, which is cost per install divided by the rate at which installs become subscribers. A $1 install that never converts is more expensive than a $6 install that does.

Budget for creative replacement as well as media. Creative fatigue arrives faster on a small audience than a large one, and a launch plan with one video in it stops working in a fortnight.

How do you use creators when nobody has heard of you?

Pay creators for content and usage rights rather than for reach. A new app offers a creator nothing their audience is waiting for, so the deal that works is a production deal: they demonstrate the app on screen, you license the footage and run it as advertising.

Screen-recorded demonstration is what converts for apps, because there is no physical product to show and the ad has to prove the thing works. Our analysis of UGC ads for mobile apps covers the measured size of that effect and which formats deliver it.

Brief narrowly and buy a few at a time. Three creators with three different openings on the same core demonstration will tell you which promise strangers respond to, and that answer then belongs in your store screenshots and your paywall as well as in the ads.

The second-order benefit is the social proof you cannot otherwise manufacture. Creator footage running as paid media gives a brand new app the appearance of being used, which no amount of design does.

Getting that chain right, from the creator promise through the store listing to the paywall, is the work we take on when we run an app launch end to end, because a mismatch anywhere along it shows up as installs that never convert.

What should you measure in the first 90 days?

Measure install-to-trial or install-to-paid conversion, day-one and day-seven retention, and cost per paying user. Those three tell you whether the product works, whether the promise was honest, and whether the economics close. Installs and impressions move first and answer none of it.

Hold the conversion number against a published benchmark rather than against your hopes. According to RevenueCat’s State of Subscription Apps 2026, median day-35 download-to-paid conversion in North America is 2.6%, with the top quartile above 5.6%, which is enough to tell a funnel problem from a traffic problem.

Retention is the early warning. An app converting acceptably with poor day-seven retention is buying refunds and churn, and scaling spend against it multiplies the loss. Fix retention before raising budget, not after.

Review the numbers weekly and change one thing at a time. With a few hundred installs a week, changing the creative, the paywall and the targeting together leaves you unable to attribute the result to any of them.

Set a decision point before you start rather than after the money is spent. Decide in advance what conversion rate and what cost per paying user would justify raising the budget, what would justify changing the offer, and what would mean stopping.

The short version

Get the store listing right before you buy traffic, because every channel runs through it and a conversion rate improvement applies to all of them at once. Write the first screenshot and the subtitle for a stranger, and set up subscription and event tracking before launch day rather than after.

Then buy a small amount of qualified traffic through one channel and read it properly.

According to Adapty’s 2026 benchmarks, Apple Ads converts install-to-trial at 3.66%, about 2.5 times other paid channels, which makes it the usual first test for a subscription app, while paid social is the better opener when nobody is searching for your category yet.

Size the test by your niche’s cost per install, which the same study found spans 30x across sub-niches around a $1.43 median.

Manufacture the social proof you lack with creator demonstrations you license and run as ads, and with in-app review prompts timed to a real success moment. Then judge the launch on install-to-trial, day-seven retention and cost per paying user. With 560,000 new apps added to the App Store in six months against 2% download growth, nothing is going to find you on its own.