Decoding a $2M/Month App's Marketing Strategy Through Its App Store Reviews

In my previous post I wrote about how to learn from the reviews of a competing app. In this post, I'm going to look at a real app and analyze its reviews to check what we can learn from them. We'll take a look at what the users like, how they use the app, what they don't like, and which features they wish the app had.

Getting the reviews to analyze

We'll take a look at the US reviews of the app Cleanup: Phone Storage Cleaner - it's a very popular app with around 200K ratings and a 4.7 average. According to appfigures, this app makes around $2M per month.

You can read the reviews on the App Store by going to this link.

I didn't even try the app, and all of the conclusions are solely from reading the reviews. I think you'll be surprised how much it's possible to learn just from user's reviews.

Trigger to download

Maybe you've seen the banner on your iPhone letting you know that you are running out of storage. I've had it pop up before and it's annoying, but this app turned it into an estimated $2M+ a month business. Let's analyze how.

Many of the reviewers mention that this banner is what triggered their search, and download. A very common reason for running out of space is that when we take photos, instead of just taking one and risking a bad one, we snap a bunch and plan to choose the best one and delete the other ones. But of course, we never get to do it, so we end up with many more photos than we need until there's no storage left.

Luckily, Apple offers a built in way to delete duplicate photos, as documented here. But not many know about this solution. The "cleanup app", on the other hand, is constantly appearing on Instagram ads (as mentioned by some reviewers) and appears high in results when users search for a way to "cleanup storage" on the App Store. Also, I think the app finds 'similar' photos, whereas the built-in feature works only with identical duplicates.

But before you get upset at the app for monetizing a solution that exists for free, remember that Apple could easily have added a link from the banner to a "storage cleanup" screen with this feature, but instead there's a link to purchase more storage from Apple. In fact, some reviewers mention that this app is a better solution for them than paying Apple for more storage.

Onboarding / Monetization

Once the potential user clicks on the Instagram ad or finds the app on the App Store and downloads it, they can use it for free but with a limit of 5 photos a day. To delete more than 5 photos, you have two options: either watch ads to delete 25 more photos per day, or pay $5 a week (with a free trial). There's also an option for a one-time lifetime charge that you pay once to unlock the app forever.

Many reviewers mention the option to watch a video ad instead of paying as a huge positive. These users would probably never pay anyway, and would not use the app at all. But instead, the app maker makes money from ad views, and also gets more downloads and positive reviews.

Given that this app is already estimated to generate $2M/month revenue just from in-app payments, the fact that it also probably makes a similar amount from showing ads is amazing.

'Duplicate Photos Removal' VS 'Storage Cleaner'

One interesting thing I've noticed is the app's screenshots mention a variety of different features, but the reviewers all mention only the feature of removing duplicate photos.

The app's screenshots list these additional features:

• merge duplicate contacts
• clean your mailbox
• hide private photos & videos behind a passcode
• set charging animations (that's random and kind of unrelated)

But it seems like none of the reviewers cares about these additional features at all. Only the contacts feature was mentioned once, but besides that, the main use of the app is to delete duplicates.

I can think of two reasons why the screenshots target more features than actually used:

1. It's possible that mentioning a variety of different features converts potential users better and makes them download the app, even though these features don't get any significant usage. Maybe, when searching for apps, users prefer to see an app with many ways to clean up storage, and they choose it over another app that only deletes duplicates. However, when they actually download the app, they end up using only this one feature.

Do new users even know that they are looking for a duplicate photos remover? Their problem, as they understand it, is that they ran out of storage and they look for a "storage cleaner" or "phone cleaner" first and foremost.

2. It's also possible that it would be better to target only the removal of duplicate photos and the app maker just didn't check their usage analytics, or reviewers simply don't mention the other features even though they do use them.

I tend to think it's option number 1, because the app is doing so well and it's well optimized in all other aspects. I think it's more likely that the app maker tried different variations and ended up with a set of screenshots with the highest conversion rate to app downloads.

Time and storage saved

My favorite thing about the app is how it shows users how much storage space and time they saved by using it. You can see this in one of the screenshots as well.

It's possible to calculate the storage space accurately, but the 'time saved' number is just a very rough estimate. Nevertheless, I was surprised to see how many reviewers mentioned in the comments how much storage and time they saved! Some reviews even mention the actual numbers the app gave them.

It's such a small feature and may look insignificant, but according to the reviews, this feature seems to have a big impact on users and the perception of the value the app provides for them.

Ads cost money

$4.99 per WEEK is a steep price for an app that likely runs on the device and doesn't even have many servers or API costs. There are many reviewers who complain that the app should be free or cheaper.

But consider that this app is one of the most popular cleaning apps on the App Store, and from other reviews, it seems like they probably do spend a lot of money on advertising. There could be a better, cheaper app out there but we're not talking about it because users simply don't know about it. This hypothetical app can afford to be much cheaper because it doesn't spend so much money on ads.

It seems like in this category of cleaning apps, all of the top apps already optimize for ASO and keywords, and all of them have many reviews. So I don't think it's practical to compete for organic traffic for these keywords on the App Store.

So in reality, there can be two options:

• A cheap or even free app - at the bottom of the search results, that no one knows about.
• An expensive app - that spends a lot of money on ads which brings a lot of users that cover the expenses of the ads and generate some profit for the app maker.

Common issues with the app

There are a few issues with the app that come up repeatedly in reviews. Some complain that it's slow, and sometimes crashes and loses all progress of images chosen for deletion. There are also a few complaints about the functionality; specifically, that the app does not identify all of the photo duplicates.

Other issues that come up including the photos being randomly rearranged after deletion, or it not being clear which album they were moved to.

One interesting and common complaint was that when users go through many photos, sometimes spending hours on it, and then when they try to delete, the app glitches and loses all progress. Would it be better to delete photos in batches? Or is it possible that the app lets the user select many photos before showing them the payment prompt, so that they will be more likely to pay after spending so much time on marking photos to delete? We can't know for sure from just reading the reviews, but it's an interesting question to explore.

There are also many positives about the app that are constantly mentioned. Many users mention that this app is much easier and better than any other app they have tried.

One thing to keep in mind is that the reviews are likely to have more users with negative experience because they are the ones who take the time to write a review. Also, with such a large number of users, there will always be instances of glitches and unhappy users.

Keywords reviewers use

While reading the reviews, I've noticed a few terms which the reviewers keep mentioning. I would assume that these are also the terms that potential users use to search for a similar app.

Some of the keywords are as follows:

• clean/clear up, delete, organize, get rid of, remove, free up
• similar, duplicate
• photos, pictures, storage, space

Overall, the app does a great job with ASO and uses all the main keywords in the title and subtitle.

Similar apps

Are you surprised that this kind of app is so popular and makes so much money? Then you might also be surprised to learn that it's only one app out of many in a highly competitive niche, with other apps making similar amounts or more. Check out these apps for comparison: Smart Cleaner, Cleaner Guru, Phone Cleaner and there are many many more similar apps.

Conclusion

It's fascinating to me how much information one can get just from reading the reviews, without even trying the app at all. Listening to and interviewing real users is an important part of marketing, and reading reviews from real users is an efficient way to do market research.

Was there something that surprised you in my analysis? Do you use a similar approach - reading reviews - when doing market research? Let me know in the comments.

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