How to know when your app is featured on the App Store

Apple tells you about one kind of featuring. If your app lands in select placements on the Today tab, the App Store Connect app sends you a notification. Every other shelf, on every other tab, in every one of the other 170 storefronts, arrives without a word — and usually you hear about it from a stranger on the internet, a week late.

What Apple actually tells you

In November 2024 Apple shipped Featuring Nominations and, alongside it, a notification. The wording in Apple's own announcement is precise, and worth reading twice:

Every phrase in that sentence is load-bearing:

• select placements — a subset, not all of them. In practice the marquee slots: App of the Day, Game of the Day, and the stories Apple's editors treat as headline placements.
• on the Today tab — not the Apps tab, not the Games tab, not a category page, not a category shelf.
• via the App Store Connect app — on a phone, with the app installed, notifications allowed, signed in to the account that holds the app.

When it does fire it is genuinely good: tapping the notification hands you a set of Apple-designed “Promote Your App” marketing assets, ready to post. It is simply the top of the pyramid, and the pyramid is much wider than most developers realise.

The part nobody warns you about

The App Store is not one store. It is 171 storefronts, each with its own editors and its own editorial calendar. Every one of them has a Today, an Apps and a Games tab, and every tab is a stack of named shelves — “Best New Apps and Updates”, “Editors' Choice Apps”, “Apps You Might've Missed” and dozens more, each one filled by a person who chose the apps on it.

Apple's notification reaches a slice of one of those tabs. Everything else — the whole Apps tab, the whole Games tab, the category shelves, and all of it repeated across 170 more countries — happens in silence.

Being featured in a country you have never opened the App Store in is the normal case, not the exotic one.

Smaller storefronts feature more aggressively, because there is less to choose from — and they are exactly the ones you will never think to check. “Best New Apps and Updates” exists in Japan too, run by different editors, refreshed on Japanese time, in Japanese. Your App Store Connect app stays quiet.

Option 1: watch App Analytics for a Browse spike

This is where most developers end up, and it is free and official. In App Store Connect, open Analytics → Acquisition → Sources and look at App Store Browse. Apple defines it as:

A feature usually shows up as a step change in Browse impressions — not a gentle rise, a cliff. That is a real signal. Its limits are real too:

So a Browse spike is a hypothesis, not an answer. Working out what caused one is a skill of its own — see your App Store impressions spiked: was it a feature?

Option 2: go looking for it yourself

You can switch your App Store to another country and scroll its editorial tabs. That is fine for a hunch — you launched in Germany, you want to see what Germany is showing today.

It is also the option that quietly fails. There are 171 storefronts, each running to its own calendar and its own clock, and a shelf can appear and rotate away between two of your checks. Doing this thoroughly, every day, in every country, is not a habit anyone keeps for a week — which is why the placements people miss are almost never the ones they went looking for.

Option 3: let StoreGlance do it

StoreGlance is an iPhone app that watches the App Store for you. Add your apps once — and your competitors' — and it tells you the day one of them is featured, anywhere.

• A push on the day it happens, not a screenshot someone posts a week later.
• All 171 storefronts, including every one you would never think to open.
• The shelf, the country and the slot — plus the apps sitting either side of you on it.
• Competitors as first-class citizens, so you see which rivals the editors are picking.
• A featuring history per app, with a 13-week calendar, so you can point at your record when you nominate.
• Top chart positions per storefront alongside it, with the day-over-day move.

Larger ASO platforms (AppTweak, Sensor Tower, AppFollow and friends) also track featuring, bundled into suites priced for teams with an ASO budget. StoreGlance does this one job, on your phone, for indie money.

The options, side by side

Written by the maker of StoreGlance, so read the last row with that in mind. The first two rows are free and worth doing regardless.

What to do the day you find out

A feature is a short window, so the useful moves are the fast ones:

• Screenshot the shelf while it is live. It disappears when the shelf rotates, and it is the single best piece of marketing collateral you will get for free.
• Look at the neighbours. The apps beside you on a shelf tell you which editor picked you and what they thought you were.
• Do not ship that day. A crash spike during your one week on “Best New Apps and Updates” is an expensive way to learn this.
• Note the date. Editors revisit apps they have featured before, and a featuring history is exactly the thing a nomination can point at.

All four are easier when something hands you the shelf, the country and the neighbours on the morning it happens — which is the whole reason StoreGlance exists.

Frequently asked