ASO for small app studios: sharing one keyword workflow

Two to five people ship a handful of apps. Engineers write the code, one of you also handles the store pages, and nobody has a budget line for a monthly ASO subscription.

• ASO has no owner. Keywords get touched before a release and forgotten after.
• Decisions live in someone's head. When the person leaves the project, the reasoning for each keyword leaves with them.
• Several apps, one person. Each app has its own countries, languages and competitors.
• Pricing tiers sized for bigger teams. Plans with seats and shared dashboards cost more than a small studio needs.

1. Pick one ASO owner. That person installs LocalASO and activates the key on their Mac.
2. Add each studio app as My app and its closest rivals as Competitor. You can add as many apps as you like and switch between them.
3. For each app, read the board and mark which keywords are worth the effort. The verdicts (Swap, Dead, Hard, Push, Maybe) give the team a shared vocabulary for the review.
4. In Optimize, generate the proposal per language. Use Export to file to write JSON and Markdown per language, then commit those files to the app's repository or paste them in your tracker.
5. Teammates review the exported text and the reasons, not the app. The owner uploads a draft through the App Store Connect key or pastes the fields.

The keyword research guide can serve as the studio's written method, and the localization guide covers which languages to take first.

• One license is one Mac. A second person using the app needs a second license. Moving a key to another Mac is possible through the license portal, with a yearly limit.
• Data stays on the owner's Mac. Boards and rank history are not shared automatically. That is good for privacy and awkward for handover; exports are the workaround.
• No roles, comments or approvals inside the app.
• Estimates, not Apple counts. Volume and difficulty derive from rating counts.

If the whole team needs one shared web workspace, look at a team plan. For example, MobileAction's top ASO tier, as of November 2026, lists unlimited seats and a dedicated customer success manager, and is sold through demo booking. That is a different product shape and price class.

Developers who run an agent can also let it read the board through the MCP server instead of copying text around.

Start with one app and one owner, then decide whether a second license is worth it. See pricing or download the app. Freelancers who serve studios like yours are covered in ASO for freelancers and agencies, and the same method scales to many titles, as described for a publisher with many apps.