Games Featured on iOS 11's App Store Games Tab See Up to 450% Boost in Installs

For most mobile developers—especially small studios and independent game makers—having their app featured by Apple on the App Store is considered a pinnacle of success. It's also known to have potentially enormous impact on how many people actually download the featured apps, something our recent analysis of iOS 11 App Store featuring confirmed.

In that report, we showed the effect of featuring on all apps. Today, we reveal how games in particular can benefit from being chosen by the App Store's editorial team for a starring role.

As the chart below illustrates, the four main types of featuring present on the App Store's Games Tab all delivered significant percentage increases in new installs for games featured during our study period, which began with the launch of iOS 11 in September 2017 and ended earlier this month. Specifically, median weekly downloads of featured games at least doubled, while one feature type more than quadrupled installs.

While the most prominent type of feature in terms of position and size on the Games Tab, the Hero Banner, delivered the largest number of median weekly downloads at about 20,000 more than the preceding week (236 percent growth), it was actually the Medium List that resulted in the largest percentage increase at 451 percent growth. Still, even Small Lists and Video/Screenshot features also more than doubled median weekly installs for their apps, at 355 percent and 285 percent, respectively.

It's obvious that the iOS 11 App Store is having a profound impact on featured games. Next up, we'll look at how non-game apps fare when featured on the revamped store.