Rejection risks
Checked against Apple's App Review Guidelines and Google Play's metadata policy.
- NoteNot a policy issue — keyword efficiency
Short description spends indexed characters on new
Nobody searches new. Replace them with a term someone types.
Why it mattersPermitted, but nobody searches these words, and Play indexes this field heavily enough that the waste is measurable.
Removed new63 charsWater sort puzzle with depth: mechanics keep changing the rules
Sign in and it stays in your studio with its score history. The link keeps working either way.
Cosmo Color Sort: Water Puzzle
No change vs last checkGoogle Play · grade B · challenger · DriveCode LLC
- Title & subtitle6.2
- Description10.0
- Visual assets9.5
- Ratings & reviews2.0
- Metadata & freshness10.0
- Conversion signals10.0
The 3 things that matter
Ranked by consequence, not by effort. A blocker stops the listing publishing; a quick win is the cheapest remaining move.
- 1Critical
No ratings yet
With zero social proof the listing converts on copy and visuals alone. Add an in-app review prompt at a success moment — SKStoreReviewController on iOS, the In-App Review API on Play — before spending effort on keywords.
Why it mattersBoth stores use rating volume as a ranking input, and a listing with none has to win on copy and screenshots alone.
- 2Warning
sort, water, puzzle repeated across title and Short description
sort, water, puzzle
Replace sort, water, puzzle in the short description with terms the title does not already cover.
Why it mattersBoth stores index a word once. A repeat buys no extra ranking and spends characters that could have covered a different query.
Removed repeated terms (sort, water, puzzle)49 charswith depth: new mechanics keep changing the rules
- 3Note
Short description leaves 12 characters unused
“Water sort puzzle with depth: new mechanics keep changing the rules.” — 68/80
Extend it toward 80 characters with complementary keywords — not the ones already in the title.
Why it mattersThis field is indexed separately from the title, so it is a second slot of search surface — not a subtitle for the first.
Asking App Store whether the same app is listed there…
Everything else (4)
- Note
Description uses no bold or lists
3072 characters, plain text
Play renders bold, italic and list tags. On a phone the first screen of a long description is a wall unless something breaks it up.
Why it mattersPlay indexes the whole description, so length is not the problem — reading it is. Emphasis and lists are the only formatting the store renders, and plenty of large listings skip them, so this is an opportunity rather than a fault.
- Note
Promotional text could not be read
The 170-character promotional text sits above the description and updates without a release. It is not indexed, but it is prime conversion space — check App Store Connect.
Why it mattersIt is the only copy on an Apple listing that can change without shipping a build.
- Note
No preview video
Worth far less on Play than on iOS — video does not autoplay and few people tap it. Deprioritise unless you already have the asset.
Why it mattersA preview autoplays in search results, where a static screenshot does not move. It is usually the largest single conversion gain still available.
- Note
Screenshot caption text not assessed
Play does not index caption text, so this is a conversion question rather than a ranking one.
Why it mattersApple indexes the text drawn on screenshots, and reading it means reading the images rather than the listing markup. This check does not do that.
What this check could not see
- Which languages the Play listing is translated into — Play does not publish the list, so localisation breadth is scored on iOS only.
- Screenshot caption text — requires reading the images, not the listing markup.
- Keyword search volume and exact rankings — needs the Apple Search Ads API or a live rank crawl, not a single listing fetch.
Larko Studio — the rewrite
Title, subtitle, the byte-counted Apple keyword field, both descriptions and screenshot captions, per store and per locale. Every variant re-measured against the limits after it is written, so nothing over-length ever reaches you.
Built and not switched on. We are finishing the free surfaces first, and we would rather find out whether anyone wants this than assume it.
The written analysis
The verdict, the brand-tier reasoning, and the three things to fix first in priority order rather than forty findings of equal weight. The numbers stay computed — the analysis explains and prioritises them, it never recounts them.
Built and not switched on. It costs money per run, which is the one thing this stage is designed not to spend yet.
Larko Watch — did the change work
Daily rank observation per keyword, per store, per country, joined to the history of your metadata. So a subtitle you changed on Tuesday ties to what happened to the rank, instead of to a hunch.
The history it needs is already accruing daily — it cannot be backfilled later, so it starts before the feature does. The feature itself is further out than Studio.