How to Get Your First App Installs With No Users and No Budget (2026)

Quick answer: With no budget and no audience, store search is the only channel that gives a new app real install volume in its first two months. Installs from search are traffic multiplied by conversion: traffic comes from ranking for keywords where the top 10 is not all household names, and conversion comes from your icon and first two screenshots. Pick a winnable long-tail keyword, put it in your app name and subtitle, fill all 100 characters of the iOS keyword field, then make screenshot 1 explain the app at thumbnail size. Everything else (Product Hunt, Reddit, paid ads, press) is a spike; this is the floor that keeps paying.

Every launch post I read tells you to "build an audience before you ship." Great advice, useless if you are three weeks from a deadline with no audience.

So here is the version for the situation you are actually in: the app is nearly done, nobody knows who you are, and you need installs. I have shipped into this exact position and I have watched a lot of other people do it. What follows is ordered by how much install volume it produces per hour you spend on it.

Why store search is the floor and everything else is a spike

A new app has no ratings, no reviews, no backlinks, no brand searches, and no word of mouth. Almost every growth channel you have read about assumes you have at least one of those. Store search assumes none of them.

The other channels are worth doing, and I will get to them, but understand what they are. A Product Hunt launch, a Reddit post that lands, a tweet that goes further than expected: these are spikes. They produce installs for 48 hours and then stop. If your listing does not convert, the spike is wasted, and if you have no search presence, the day after the spike looks exactly like the day before it.

Store search compounds instead. Rank for a term in week two and it is still delivering installs in week ten without you touching it. That is the difference between a launch and a growth curve, and if you are being judged on traction (as in RevenueCat's Shipaton Build & Grow award), the curve is the thing that gets measured.

Input 1: rank for something you can actually win

Most new apps target a keyword they have no chance at. "Fitness". "Budget". "Notes". The top 10 for those is household names with millions of ratings, and you will not crack it this quarter no matter how good your app is.

The move is to go down the tail until the competition thins out, then own that term completely.

Look at who currently ranks, not just at search volume. A term with modest volume where the top results are apps with 200 ratings is worth ten times a high-volume term where the top results have 200,000. Volume tells you the size of the prize; the current top 10 tells you whether you can reach it. Our free ASO tool shows you both for any term, and you can check a competitor's listing to see the terms they rank for that you do not.

Prefer specific over broad. "Home workout planner" over "fitness". "Receipt scanner for freelancers" over "scanner". Specific terms have lower volume and dramatically lower competition, and the traffic they send converts better because the searcher described exactly your app.

Ranking #3 on a small term beats #50 on a big one. This sounds obvious written down and yet almost everyone optimizes for volume anyway. Nobody scrolls to position 50. Tap-through drops off a cliff after the top few results, so a term where you can realistically land top 5 is worth more than a term where you land mid-table.

Then put the keyword where the store will index it. On iOS that is three fields with very different weights: the app name (30 characters, the strongest signal by far), the subtitle (30 characters, nearly as strong), and the keyword field (100 characters, invisible to users). Google Play has no keyword field and indexes your description instead, so the same strategy needs different execution. I wrote up which keyword belongs in which field because getting this wrong is the most common ASO mistake I see.

One timing note that matters more than it should: decide your keyword before you finalize your app name. The name is your strongest indexed field, it is capped at 30 characters, and names are reserved first-come in App Store Connect. Choosing it last means either giving up the field or renaming late.

Input 2: convert the impression you worked for

Ranking gets you an impression. An impression is a thumbnail in a scrolling list next to five competitors. You get roughly two seconds.

At that size the user sees your icon, your name, and one or two screenshot panels. That is the entire pitch.

Screenshot 1 has to explain the app on its own. Most people never see panel 3. If your first panel is a raw UI capture with no caption, that is the single highest-leverage fix available to you, and it costs an afternoon. Show the outcome, caption it in large high-contrast type, and make sure it is legible when it is 200 pixels wide.

Caption benefits, not features. "Never lose a receipt again" beats "Advanced document scanning". You are answering "what do I get", not "what did you build".

Order the set as a story. Hook, proof, features, social proof. A feature dump reads like a feature dump. Reordering is free, so do it before you redesign anything.

Use more slots than your competitors do. Top chart apps average around 6.7 screenshots and iOS allows 10. Filling them puts you ahead of most of the chart on effort alone.

Export at exact store dimensions. App Store Connect rejects off-spec uploads, and a rejection at the wrong moment costs you days. Generate at spec in the screenshot generator or check yours against the size reference.

The reason I keep pushing on screenshots over almost everything else: conversion is a multiplier on every channel at once. Double your conversion rate and you have doubled the return on your search traffic, your Product Hunt spike, your Reddit post, and any ads you eventually run. Nothing else in a launch has that property.

The spikes, ranked by what they are actually worth

Once the two compounding inputs are in place, spikes are worth chasing. Roughly in order of effort-to-return for a solo dev:

1. The niche community where your users already are. Not r/apple or r/androidapps, where every third post is a dev promoting an app. The subreddit or Discord about the problem your app solves. One genuinely useful comment in a small relevant community outperforms ten launch announcements in a big irrelevant one. Read the rules first; self-promo bans are enforced.
2. Building in public. Posting the work as you do it costs almost nothing extra and compounds slowly into an audience for your next launch. Store assets are the easiest content here: a mockup of the screen you just finished, a before and after of a caption rewrite, real numbers from a test.
3. Product Hunt. One good day, occasional press pickup, mostly other founders rather than your target users. Worth doing once, not worth building your plan around.
4. App review sites and newsletters in your category. Slow, sometimes free, occasionally surprising.
5. Paid ads. Fine for testing which message converts, bad as your primary install source before you know your retention numbers. You will burn budget teaching yourself things a free keyword tool could have told you.

What I would do with two weeks left

Concretely, if the app is nearly done and the deadline is close:

• Day 1: Keyword research. Pick one head term and 10 long-tails. Lock the app name and subtitle around them. Reserve the name.
• Day 2: Screenshot set. Six to ten panels, captioned, benefit-led, exported at spec. This is the day that pays.
• Day 3: Fill the keyword field to 100 characters, write the description with the first line selling the outcome, and prepare your Play assets including the 1024 x 500 feature graphic that people forget.
• Day 4: Submit. Early. Review is usually quick but a metadata rejection is a full round trip.
• Remaining days: Pin your keyword shortlist in a rank tracker so you have a pre-launch baseline, then spend the time in the communities where your users are.
• Day 10 onward: Re-run keyword research. Apple takes a week or two to re-index, so this is when you find out what actually landed, plus bonus terms you got indexed for by accident. Those are free intelligence for your first update.

The apps that get traction in eight weeks are almost never the most technically impressive ones. They are the ones where someone spent one deliberate afternoon on the listing while everyone else spent it polishing an animation nobody in search results will ever see.

FAQ

How long does it take to rank for App Store keywords? Expect 7 to 14 days after a metadata change before Apple has re-indexed and ranks stabilize. That is why you set your keywords before launch rather than after: waiting until week six to start means the ranking arrives after the window you cared about has closed.

How many installs does a new app get on day one? Without an existing audience or paid promotion, usually single or low double digits. That is normal and not a signal that the app is bad. The number that matters is the slope over the following weeks, which is driven by whether you rank for anything and whether that ranking converts.

Should I run paid ads to get my first installs? Not as your primary channel before you know your retention and conversion numbers. Ads are a good way to test which message converts and a fast way to lose money on installs that never come back. Fix the free multiplier (your listing) first, because paid traffic lands on the same product page.

Do App Store screenshots really affect installs? Yes, and it is the strongest lever you fully control. Screenshots sit between every impression and every install, so improving them raises the return on every channel simultaneously. The first two panels do nearly all of the work because most users never scroll further.

What is the fastest ASO fix for a brand-new app? Rewriting screenshot 1 so a stranger can tell what the app does from that panel alone at thumbnail size, then filling the iOS keyword field to all 100 characters. Both take an afternoon and neither costs anything.

Can I change my app name after launch to add keywords? On iOS you can update your name, subtitle, and keyword field with any new app version, and many teams iterate on them deliberately. The catch is that names are reserved first-come, so a name you want may be gone by the time you decide to switch. Claim early, iterate later.

Related Guides

• Shipaton 2026: The Store Launch Checklist if you are shipping between August 1 and September 30
• App Launch Checklist: Every Store Asset You Need
• How to Pick App Store Keywords Before You Have Any Downloads
• The ASO Checklist: 20 Steps
• App Store Optimization Guide