90% of top apps never test their icon: what a 1,000-app benchmark study found

AppTweak tracked the top 1,000 US apps and games through 2025 and found a habit that only goes so far: plenty of teams test screenshots, almost none test an icon or a preview video. Here is what the data says actually correlates with getting noticed, and what most of the market still leaves undone.

What was actually measured

AppTweak, an ASO and Apple Ads platform, published its ASO & Apple Ads trends and benchmarks report 2026 in July 2026, built from the top 1,000 apps and games in the US across the App Store and Google Play, tracking their 2025 activity, plus roughly 2,800 US Apple Search Ads advertisers. It is one vendor’s view of the market it can see, not an audited census, but the sample is large enough and the categories specific enough to be more useful than the usual "best practices" post.

The testing gap: screenshots get attention, icons and video don’t

The report’s clearest finding is not that top apps test too little. It is that testing effort is concentrated almost entirely on one asset. Screenshots get run through repeat tests. Icons and preview video, both of which are shown before a single screenshot on most surfaces, are mostly left alone.

The gap is easiest to explain as a cost problem. A screenshot variant is a new composition of assets you likely already have; a fresh icon concept or a cut preview video is a production job most teams keep deprioritising. The result is that the first thing almost every visitor sees, an app’s icon, is also the thing least likely to have ever been tested against an alternative.

What it takes to get featured

Ratings look like the harder filter of the two. Across both stores, featured placement and a mediocre rating almost never coexist in AppTweak’s sample.

In-app events are quietly becoming a games requirement

In-app events, the App Store’s way of surfacing a live update, tournament or seasonal drop on a listing, have gone from a nice-to-have to close to a norm for top games in three years.

Apps outside gaming are well behind that curve: only 38% of top apps ran more than 5 in-app events in 2025, roughly where top games were three years earlier. For a non-game app with a genuine reason to post updates (a seasonal feature, a limited offer, a content drop) that gap looks more like unclaimed shelf space than a signal that events don’t apply outside games.

What a category actually costs to advertise

The report’s Apple Ads numbers are a useful reality check for anyone benchmarking their own cost per install against a generic industry average, because the category spread is enormous.

A Sports app paying $26.70 per install is not necessarily running an inefficient campaign; it may simply be competing in the category where AppTweak’s tracked advertisers pay the most. The number only means something once it is compared against other apps in the same category, not against a blended across-category figure.

What to actually do with this

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