Your app's name works harder than your keyword field.

Developers agonize over the 100-character keyword list and dash off the name in the last minute before submission. That's backwards. The name is indexed at least as heavily as anything else on the listing, it's the only indexed field every searcher actually reads, and on iOS it's the hardest one to change later. Here's how to spend its 30 characters.

One field, two jobs

Search is where store traffic lives — Apple's own advertising material says 70% of App Store visitors use search and almost 65% of downloads happen directly after one. And look at what a search result actually renders: icon, name, subtitle, a couple of screenshots. Your keyword field influences whether you appear; your name influences whether you appear and whether anyone taps. It's the only piece of metadata doing both jobs at once.

Neither store publishes ranking weights, so treat any exact percentage you read with suspicion. But the observable behavior is consistent, and every ASO tool that reverse-engineers rankings lands on the same ordering: words in the name outrank the same words in the subtitle, which outrank the same words in the keyword list. If a term matters to you, the name is the most valuable place it can live.

The shape that survives 30 characters

Both stores cap the name at 30 characters — Apple trimmed it from 50 back in 2017, Google followed in 2021 — so the era of sentence-long names is over. What fits, and works, is a two-part shape: a short brand, a separator, and two or three plain words that say what the app is. Ledgerly — Budget Tracker. Drift: Sleep Sounds. The brand carries recognition; the descriptor carries the search terms.

The mistake is spending the descriptor on a tagline. "Unleash your finances" indexes nothing anyone types. Descriptor words should be the literal nouns a stranger would search for — the same discipline as the keyword field, just pointed at your most valuable real estate. And don't repeat yourself across fields: Apple indexes name, subtitle, and keyword list together, and a word only needs to appear once. Every duplicate is a free character you paid for twice.

One under-used detail: the name is localizable per storefront. The brand stays constant, but "Budget Tracker" can become the words people actually type in Japan or Brazil — a cheap extension of the case we made for localizing the rest of your listing.

The rules that get names rejected

Both stores police this field, because for years it was the spammiest one in the building. On Apple's side the relevant rule is Guideline 2.3.7: choose a unique name, and don't pack metadata with trademarked terms, other apps' names, prices, or irrelevant phrases. Keyword-salad names — brand, colon, then six loosely related nouns — are exactly what reviewers are told to flag. Note "unique" is literal on the App Store: no two apps can share a name, first come, first served. (Google Play has no such rule — a dozen apps can all be called "Budget Tracker", which is itself a reason to have a brand word.)

Google's rules arrived with the same 2021 update that cut titles to 30 characters, and they're specific: no store-performance or ranking claims, no price or promo language — "free", "best", "top", "#1", "sale", "download now" are all named — no emoji, no repeated special characters, and no ALL CAPS unless the capitalization is genuinely part of your brand. If your app was called Something Free in 2020, this is why it isn't anymore.

Renaming is cheap on one store and sticky on the other

On Google Play, the title is just a store-listing field. Edit it whenever you like; it goes through listing review and ships — no build, no release. On iOS, the name can only be changed when you have a version in an editable state, and the change rides through App Review with that version. A typo in your iOS name waits for your next release to die.

Two practical consequences. First, treat the iOS name like an API contract: decide it carefully, batch changes with releases, and don't churn it — search rankings need time to settle after a rename. Second, use Play as the test bench. The stores' search engines differ, but the humans typing into them don't; if a descriptor moves impressions on Google Play, it's a strong candidate for your next iOS release.

Choosing the descriptor words

Pick the phrase a stranger would type, not the vocabulary you use internally. You built "expense OCR"; people search "receipt scanner". You built a "focus timer with ambient soundscapes"; people search "study timer". Then search both stores for your candidate phrase and read page one. If every result is a household name, the head term alone won't rank you — the qualifier is doing the work, so choose it deliberately: "for couples", "offline", "for kids".

Last test: say the full name out loud. It should sound like a product, not a query log. That's roughly the smell test a reviewer applies, and it's also what a person deciding between two search results applies half a second before tapping one of them.

Write the whole listing as one system

Name, subtitle, and keyword field are one 160-character budget that should never repeat itself — which is easier said than counted. ShotCanvas drafts the full set with AI inside each store's real limits, pairs it with screenshots built from your actual screens, and publishes the lot straight to App Store Connect and Google Play.