Apple WWDC 2025: What to expect for ASO in the next months

Last week, Apple held its annual Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC), during which the company announced many of the upcoming changes coming to Apple products, from iPhone and iPads to the next version iOS and iPadOS, as well as some changes destined to improve the lives of ASO practitioners. Let’s review the most significant announcements and analyze what they will mean for app marketers.

Custom product pages will soon appear in organic search results

Ever since their release, custom product pages (CPPs) have been much celebrated by app and game developers for the opportunity they offer to present users with store creatives that better demonstrate the relevancy of their apps for a given user intent. However, the impossibility for developers to display a CPP in App Store search results whenever they would not win the Apple Ads auction did limit their adoption.

Apple has therefore announced that developers will soon be able to link their CPPs to (organic) keywords so a CPP may appear in search results even outside of Apple Ads inventories.

Examples shared in the What’s New in App Store Connect session showed how in the upcoming revamp of App Store Connect, developers will be able to link keywords specifically from their app keyword field with a given custom product page.

What this means for ASO practitioners

While this new opportunity is largely positive for ASO, as it will open even more opportunities for conversion rate optimization, some questions surrounding the feature at the moment suggest that it may also require that ASO practitioners make tough choices once it rolls out:

1. With the apparent linking mechanism being thought exclusively for keywords in the app keyword field, developers may have to re-think which core keywords to target in their app title and subtitle (as these would not be targetable with a CPP), and which to reassign to their keyword field for specific CPP targeting.
   
2. High value keyword combinations may also prove tricky to target: If CPP linking only works in exact match for single keyword field entries, then developers may need to repeat “root” keywords multiple times in their keyword field to target different single terms and combinations with CPPs.

On the other hand, if combinations can be targeted by assigning multiple single terms that form combinations to a single CPP (as Apple’s example during the session suggested), developers may also face a risk of overlap between two CPPs targeting two separate combinations that include the same single term (for instance, an outdoor fitness app looking to use CPPs to optimise its conversion for the search queries “run tracker” and “ride tracker” may have to choose only one query). In fact, it was noted in Apple’s session that “it’s recommended that you make your keywords selection unique for each of your CPPs so that the right CPP is shown”, leaving uncertainty as to how Apple would manage overlaps between CPPs.

Last but not least, it’s worth noting Apple did not announce any increase in the total amount of CPPs you can upload to the App Store. This likely means that at this stage, most developers still use only few CPPs, however should the opportunity to link them to organic search results boost adoption, it will also be important that mobile marketing teams become more aware of the challenges to measure the impact of CPPs to decide which linking methods to prioritize. In that case, measuring the impact of a CPP on organic search conversion may be a particularly hard challenge given how conversion from that channel is affected not only by the product page content itself, but also the ranking position of an app in search results.

Tags are coming to the App Store

Another change Apple announced to both App Store search results and browse experience is the introduction of tags. Similarly to its Google Play counterpart, App Store tags will act as a subcategory system to indicate the specific features or functionalities of an app that are relevant to users, and appear in search results as well as in collections that App Store users may explore when navigating the store.

However, unlike tags in Google Play, developers will not be able to manually select any App Store tags from a predetermined list and request they be assigned to their app. Instead, all tags will be generated by a Large Language Model (LLM) and reviewed by a member of the App Store’s editorial team, while developers will only be given the option to request a tag be dissociated from their app by deselecting them in App Store Connect.

The long-term impact of tags is unclear

The announcement left multiple questions unanswered, as Apple shared the LLM-powered tag assignment will be based on your app’s metadata but did not specify if only already indexed text metadata and category information would be  determining factors in tag generation, or if long descriptions, user reviews and/or text in screenshots could also play a role in what tags get assigned to an app. Furthermore, Apple did not explain how often tags may be re-generated to account for new features and functionalities being released inside an app.

As a result, the future impact of tags is extremely uncertain: based on the UI that was showed, I would wager they will have a limited impact on conversion, though the final tag names that will be generated may turn out to be significant; meanwhile, their impact on traffic will have to be monitored, as they tie to the larger challenge Apple is facing to leverage AI to improve the quality of search results and collections featured in the App Store.

Review summaries are officially rolling out

While already rolled out as part of iOS 18.4 for English user reviews in the United States, Apple’s official announcement of its app review summary feature suggests the feature will be rolled out to more territories and languages soon. App review summaries consist of an informative paragraph between 100-300 characters in length intended to summarize commonly occurring themes and balance sentiment from all user reviews. They will only be displayed on app product pages if an app has “enough reviews to provide a summary”.

Apple also announced developers will have a couple of “fail safe” options for this feature, with a display of the review summary available in App Store Connect enriched with an indication of when the summary was last generated, as well as an option to report a concern if they feel cheated by the content of the summary.

While the feature in itself means that review management will only get more important for app developers, I do think Apple may be tempted to revisit it in the future, given how the position of the summary inside the product page as well as the UI (plain text) do not catch the attention of page visitors and will, therefore, limit the impact summaries may have on app conversion rates.

Offer codes can now be presented for all in-app purchase types

Apple announced developers will now be able to create offer codes in App Store Connect for any type of In-App Purchase (IAP), whether consumables or non-consumables, as well as subscriptions or non-subscriptions.

Furthermore, developers will be able to create up to 10 active offer codes per IAP and proceed to generate batches of up to a maximum of one million offer codes per app per quarter.

You can set redemption eligibility rules for these codes based on the consumer:

• Having ever made a purchase in the app or not
• Not having made a purchase in the last 30 daysHaving made a purchase in the last 30 days.

This marks one more effort from Apple to support developers’ reengagement and churn prevention initiatives with their users, as app monetization becomes more visible in App Store Connect in general.

Cohorted metrics (and more) are coming to App Store Connect

Though the exact timeline was not communicated, Apple did showcase an upcoming update of App Store Connect, which will include a UI refresh as well as the release of additional metrics in both the developer console and API.

Among these, the most exciting is probably the introduction of cohorted metrics relative to purchases, with two new metrics:

1. Download to paid conversion: Measures how quickly users buy
2.[Average] proceeds per download: Measures revenue growth per user over time

Additional improvements to analytics in App Store Connect also include  more flexible filtering options for detailed data visualization. Now developers will be able to combine up to seven filters when analyzing a given metric., App Store Connect will now also boast  a dedicated subscription analytics page covering 15 new subscription metrics based on “user states” or “events” to analyze your subscription funnel.

While not as revolutionary in the direct context of app store optimisation, these changes remain very significant.  They signal Apple is committing to supporting developers in their monetization efforts, and may offer an alternative to small apps that aren’t utilizing an MMP or have limited resources to implement custom events.

Icons are getting a facelift thanks to Liquid Glass

The introduction of Liquid Glass as Apple’s fundamental principle for their new design system is set to have a ripple effect on app icons, which will now benefit from more depth effects between layers in icon design.

Additionally, icons will now be unified between iOS, iPadOS and macOS, and users will be given more customization options with additional icon variations such as monochrome glass (light), monochrome glass (dark), dark tint, light tint.

Although Apple may automatically update all icons d to adjust to the new design system, app developers may also want to revisit app icons on their own to ensure visual consistency and leverage the additional icon variations introduced.

A brand new “Games” app will build on app store and game center features to boost player engagement

One of the most significant announcements at WWDC for mobile games was the upcoming introduction of a new pre-installed “Games” app to iOS. The app, which will act as a complement to both the App Store and Games Center (without replacing either at first) will aim to increase game discoverability and player engagement by offering a more social experience around gaming on iOS.

The Games app will consist of 5 key discovery sections: home, play together, library, arcade and search, all leading to dedicated game pages. The Play Together and Library tabs will focus on games players have installed and/or previously engaged with, giving them options to call on friends to join them in the game, while the Arcade and Search tabs will grant additional discovery opportunities.

Last but not least, the home page will mostly surface top content about installed games, such as ongoing in-app events and challenges, but may also highlight new games to explore for players browsing the app.

Beyond the extra real estate to promote games, the Games app will also introduce Challenges and Activities, two new features app developers can leverage to nudge players to compete with their friends. Specifically, developers will be able to define in-game content (such as specific levels) and mechanisms that players can interact with, for instance by challenging a friend to beat their high score.

While the full value of this feature will depend on the speed players adopt the new app, it’s a great approach to build even more engagement, including on “evergreen” content such as specific game levels that aren’t limited to a seasonal in-app event, and the extra visibility opportunities the feature will bring should make developer adoption very enticing.

AdAttribution Kit is giving developer more control

Finally, beyond the ASO related announcements, changes to AdAttribution Kit (the attribution framework that builds on and supersedes SKAdNetwork) did also catch our attention. While these changes will only impact performance marketing campaigns if ad networks and MMPs start utilizing them, we did note positively Apple is opening the gates for more customized controls in the attributions flows:

• New ad attribution window settings will allow developers to change their attribution window (globally or per ad network) from Apple’s default (30 days after a click or 1 day post impression)
• Control over re-engagement campaigns should become much better, with options to have multiple active re-engagement conversion windows simultaneously tracked via conversion tags, as well as an “attribution cooldown” mechanism to prevent multiple conversions from overlapping.
• Geography information (country codes) will now be available in postbacks, which should help optimizing ad delivery across different countries.

For marketers running Apple Ads campaigns, none of these changes are expected to require extra interventions in campaign management systems, as even if you were to take specific actions (for instance modifying the attribution window of the channel), these would automatically reflect in your MMP data and simply flow to AppTweak via existing integrations.

Conclusion for WWDC 2025

WWDC 2025 did not deliver groundbreaking changes for ASO, but the multiple improvements that have been announced regarding CPPs, search tags, review summaries, offer codes, App Store Connect analytics and player engagement for games all point to Apple investing more in tools for app developers who will have an easier time taking even more control over App Store marketing opportunities. With that being said, multiple announcements have left certain questions open and will make us eager to figure out the details upon the iOS 26 release, so stay tuned for more.