Hangar had only been live for a short time — approved on the first submission — when I searched “Vercel” on the App Store and found it at #21.
I was genuinely excited about that.
Hangar is a developer tool I built to trigger webhooks from an iPhone — Vercel deployments, GitHub Actions, and other commands I normally wouldn’t want to open my laptop for. Before releasing it, I spent time on the App Store listing and researched keywords manually. “Vercel” was one of the keywords I wanted Hangar to appear for.
So seeing #21 made me think the ASO was working.
Then I checked App Store Connect. The downloads were nowhere near what I expected.
I was confusing ranking with demand
This was the part I had misunderstood.
A position for a keyword tells me Apple is willing to show my app for that search. It doesn’t tell me how many people search that keyword, how far they scroll, or whether Hangar is what they wanted when they typed it.
And #21 sounds much better when you look at the number by itself. There are still twenty apps above mine.
Someone has to search for Vercel, scroll far enough to reach Hangar, notice the listing, understand what the app does, and then decide to download it. That is a much longer chain than “my app ranks for Vercel.”
Before, the number meant one thing to me:
#21, so the ASO is working.
Now I read it as a sequence, and ranking is only the first step:
ranking → visibility → product page → download
The other number I was watching
There was a second number, and I was reading it just as loosely.
Separate from the keyword position, Hangar also had a place in the Developer Tools category chart. It opened at No. 20, which felt like more evidence that things were going well. Then it went to 31. Then 141. Then 177.
I hadn’t changed anything in between.
Those two numbers are not the same kind of measurement, and that took me a while to separate properly. The keyword position is about whether Apple will show Hangar to someone searching for “Vercel.” The category chart is mostly a reflection of recent download activity, which means it sits after downloads, not before them.
So the chart position was never going to explain my download problem. It was a readout of it. As the attention around launch faded, the chart followed the downloads down, exactly as it should have.
I had been looking at a number that was an effect and treating it as a cause.
So was ranking #21 useless?
I don’t think so.
Hangar is new. Getting indexed for a keyword that genuinely relates to the product is still something I want. What changed is how much I let that number mean.
Right now I don’t have enough data to say where Hangar is losing people. Maybe #21 isn’t high enough. Maybe the keyword doesn’t carry much search volume. Maybe the listing isn’t converting. Or maybe people searching “Vercel” aren’t looking for an app like Hangar at all.
I don’t want to pretend I know which one it is.
What I’m tracking next
That uncertainty is why I’m writing this down now instead of after I have a tidy conclusion.
I’m going to keep watching the keyword position, the impressions, and the downloads together, as a series rather than as single readings. The chart position I’m mostly going to leave alone. It will move when downloads move, and watching it tells me nothing I can act on.
The case I’m most curious about is the one where the number improves and nothing else does. If Hangar climbs for “Vercel” and downloads stay flat, that’s a far more useful result than any ranking on its own.
I’ll update this post as those numbers move.