App Store A/B Testing Ideas: What to Test and in What Order

First screenshot. It is what searchers see first. Ideas: lead with the main outcome instead of the main screen; change the caption wording; show the product in use versus a benefit statement. Apple asks for screenshots that show the app in use, so keep the interface visible.

Screenshot order. Move the feature that wins on your best keyword to position one or two. Apple suggests focusing each later screenshot on one main benefit or feature.

Caption copy. Same image, different headline: a feature name versus a result the user gets.

Dark Mode. If the app supports it, Apple suggests including at least one Dark Mode screenshot. Test it as a treatment against a light-only set.

App preview. Add a preview to the first position, or remove one. Previews autoplay muted on the product page, so the first seconds must work without sound. Apple's own example here is useful: a 12-day test where adding a preview as the first asset did not beat the original screenshots.

App icon. Different color, symbol or style. An alternate icon must already be in the app binary, so icon tests need an app version first. See app icon and conversion.

Localized treatments. Each treatment can be localized in all the supported languages or just some. Test a localized caption against the primary-language caption in one storefront, and read the localized screenshots guide.

• Name, subtitle, keywords, description and promotional text.
• Custom product pages and pages for Apple Watch or iMessage.
• Anything on Android or in other stores.

Changing the subtitle or keywords is a metadata change, not a test: you can compare before and after, but traffic is not split, so seasonality and ranking changes get mixed in.

Score each idea by three numbers from 1 to 5: expected impact, effort and confidence in your hypothesis. Rank by impact times confidence divided by effort.

The scores are your own estimates, not data. The point is the order: the caption test goes first because it costs little and affects what searchers see. The preview costs the most and comes last.

1. One change per test.
2. A written hypothesis before you start.
3. At most three treatments, and fewer when traffic is low.
4. Do not stop at the first good day. Apple recommends waiting for 90% confidence.
5. Record results, including losses, in a simple log.

The setup steps are in the product page optimization guide.

Pair testing with the text you control. LocalASO helps with keywords, name, subtitle and descriptions in every language; see the Optimize docs, and the keyword field guide for the search side.