Search for "how to promote my app for free" and you get the same list every time: Product Hunt, Reddit, a pile of app directories, maybe a Discord or two. It is not wrong, exactly. It is just that nobody who writes those lists tells you which of those channels actually moves installs, and which ones quietly do nothing while feeling like progress.
We run a free feature for indie apps, so we spend a lot of time looking at how developers try to get noticed. Here is what we have actually measured, and where the free effort is worth spending.
Most app directories give you a link that Google ignores
The reflex, when you have no budget, is to submit your app to every directory you can find. It feels productive: twenty listings in an afternoon. The problem is what kind of link you get back.
When we checked several of the app and startup directories that solicit indie developers, the link they hand the apps they list carries rel="nofollow". A nofollow link tells Google not to count it as a vote. The directories keep the followed links for their own pages and give their listings the ones that pass no weight. So the twenty listings buy you almost nothing in search, and the traffic from the directories themselves is usually close to zero.
This is not a reason to avoid all directories. A well-known one with real visitors is worth a listing for the referral traffic alone. It is a reason to stop measuring your progress in submissions and start measuring it in whether anyone actually arrives.
The channels that still work, and the honest catch on each
- Product Hunt. Real reach on the day, and a followed link. The catch is that a launch you throw together the night before goes nowhere. It rewards preparation: a clear first comment, a maker who replies all day, and a handful of people who already agreed to show up.
- Reddit. The right subreddit is one of the few places a small app gets genuine feedback. The catch is that self-promotion is transparent and gets removed. What works is being specific and useful in a thread that is already about your category, not posting your link and leaving.
- Getting your listing torn apart in public. A stranger telling you exactly what is wrong with your App Store page is worth more than a hundred silent installs, because you can act on it. This is the part almost nobody offers for free, and it is the part we do.
The free ad you have already paid for, and are probably wasting
Before you spend a week chasing external channels, look at the one piece of promotion you already own: your first App Store screenshot. It is the single image every person who finds your app sees, in search results and on the product page, and it is usually the last thing anyone gives you feedback on.
We opened the first screenshot of 19 indie apps this month and wrote down what was actually in it. Eleven of the nineteen had something concretely wrong. Five had text or the phone itself running off the edge of the frame, so one app's own name rendered as "core Counte" because the caption was clipped at both sides. Four showed no app at all, just a wordmark or an illustration. Two showed the app with nothing in it, the empty state. Every one of those is a free fix that costs a stranger two seconds of confusion at the exact moment they were deciding whether to install.
There is a second, quieter one. We fingerprinted the screenshots of 39 indie listings across the American, German, Japanese, Turkish and Saudi App Stores. Thirty of the thirty-nine send every country the identical English images, including apps that are themselves translated into a dozen languages. If your app is localized and your screenshots are not, you are advertising in a language half your market does not read, for free, by accident.
Where we come in
Every week we pick a few indie apps and publish an honest teardown of their App Store screenshots: what the first frame gets right, what it costs, and the one change worth making. It is free, there is no account, and nothing is behind a paywall.
What you get is a page of your own on our site with a written breakdown of your listing, and it links to your app and to your own site with ordinary followed links, not the nofollow ones the directories hand out. If the teardown is useful, there is an optional badge. If it is not, the page stays up anyway. We run apps we find interesting, and download counts are not how we choose.
We are not going to pretend one free feature fixes your growth. It does two specific things: it gives you feedback you can act on tomorrow, and it puts a real, followed link and a written page about your app on the internet where there was none. For an indie app with no budget, those are two of the highest-leverage free things available, and most developers never get either.
Send us your app. One link, no account, and you hear back either way.