Mobile App Growth Blog

Google publishes exact numbers at which Play begins hiding your app, and most founders have never seen them. This is every current threshold, what they actually measure, why your crash reporter disagrees with Play Console, and the memory and code-optimization vitals arriving in February 2027.

An AI agent can solve a hard problem today and recreate it next month, because the lesson stayed in the conversation instead of the repository. A project bible is the smallest durable knowledge system that stops that happening — eight layers, each one routed, dated and owned, with a check attached to every rule that matters.

A passing test does not prove a bug is fixed unless you know the test would fail when the defect returns. This is the nine-step method we use to close a defect with evidence: define the invariant, reproduce the failure, add a guard that fails, repair at the correct authority, then deliberately reintroduce the bug and prove the guard catches it.

A constant can look reasonable and still be wrong at a boundary. A lookup table can name the right organisation and contain a transcription error. Documentation can describe behaviour the app stopped performing two releases ago. This is the method we use to turn every real-world claim in a product into something you can re-run on demand.

Part 11 of our AI product development methodology series. A screen-by-screen review can confirm that every form, chart and report works while missing the defect that connects them. The deeper unit of audit is data — pick the three objects whose corruption would hurt most, then name every path that can create, change or destroy them.

Code review can confirm that a colour token was used. It cannot tell you whether the screen feels balanced, whether the heading wraps badly at accessibility text sizes, or whether the success message disappears before anyone reads it. This is part 10 of the AI Product Development Methodology series: the four evidence layers a real audit needs, and the rule that stops one layer closing another layer’s claim.

Give an AI coding agent a beautiful screenshot and it will reproduce the visible surface while quietly breaking everything the screenshot cannot show — normalised units, edit identity, offline retries, entitlement checks, accessibility order. This is the five-contract, nine-phase workflow we use to turn an approved design decision into a bounded patch instead of an uncontrolled reconstruction.

The quality of an AI audit depends far less on how forcefully you ask for expertise than on what evidence you require. This is the eight-part prompt contract we arrived at after repeatedly auditing a real iOS and Android product and watching broad, confident prompts declare finished areas that were not finished.

The strongest AI-assisted workflow does not ask one tool to think, design, build and verify. It splits four responsibilities — strategic synthesis, visual exploration, repository execution and independent verification — and defines what evidence each one is allowed to produce. This is part 7 of the AI Product Development Methodology series.

Design boards are useful when they make decisions visible and dangerous when they make speculation look implemented. This is the bounded, screen-by-screen board method we used on a real iOS and Android product: one surface, one question, every state that matters, a fixed evidence pack, and a runtime comparison that decides whether the board was right.

Most redesigns start with the first screen someone opens, which is how a product ends up with twelve individually improved surfaces and no centre. A UI/UX strategy is the decision system that comes first: nine layers that turn product evidence into rules a designer, a reviewer or an AI agent can be held to. This is the method, with the one-page charter and the prompt we use to produce it.

Most audit folders contain hundreds of images and almost no evidence: polished happy paths, inconsistent crops, no error states, and design concepts sitting unlabelled beside production captures. This is the method we use instead — choosing every screenshot backward from the claim it has to prove.

Before you redesign anything, you need proof of what exists — not a sitemap, not a folder of attractive screenshots. This is the seven-register inventory method we used to map a product with 51 screens and seven sheets on one platform alone, and still find unreachable capabilities, missing recovery states and data changes with no edit button anywhere in the interface.

The first instruction you give an AI agent on an existing product should be an instruction to investigate, not to improve. This is the discovery method we run before any AI-assisted audit, redesign or implementation: eight artefacts, nine steps, and an evidence label on every claim.

AI can make a product look finished in a weekend. Looking finished and being trustworthy are different states, and only one of them survives contact with users. This is the ten-stage method we settled on for using AI to investigate broadly while letting evidence — not confidence — decide what is true.

Most paywall tests never produce a decision — the sample was too small, the metric was the wrong one, or the winner shifted users onto a cheaper plan and quietly cost money. This is the test catalogue and the method: what to test in what order, how much traffic each test class actually needs, and which mistakes void the result before you read it.

Most ASO tool roundups are written by people who have never had to justify the invoice. This one is written by an agency that pays for these tools, checked every price against the vendor's own page in August 2026, and will tell you plainly when the answer is to buy nothing at all.

Most teams pay for a product analytics tool a year before they need one, and then never instrument it properly. This is a vendor-by-vendor comparison of the mobile analytics tools worth using — Firebase, Amplitude, Mixpanel and PostHog — with every free-tier allowance checked against the vendor's own pricing page as of August 2026, and a plain answer on when free is genuinely enough.

We built and shipped an iOS app almost entirely through Claude Code. Eight of the ten critical review findings sat in persistence, sync and account identity — and not one sat in the UI we were watching every day. Here is the rules file, the review loop and the audit prompt that came out of it, and the failure behind each one.

Localisation is the only ASO change that creates new demand instead of fighting harder for demand you already compete in. This is how to choose locales from your own install data, rebuild a keyword set in a language rather than translating one, and decide which assets are worth localising — including the Indian-language opportunity almost every Western ASO guide ignores.

Play Console gives you a free A/B testing engine for your store listing, and most teams misread its rules before they run a single test. This is the mechanics guide: what the console will and will not let you test, how the traffic split and the target metric actually behave, and how to read a result that comes back as a draw.

Almost no app dies of one dramatic failure. It dies of a sequence: nobody found it, the few who did left on day one, and the numbers were too small and too flattering to show either problem in time. This is the failure taxonomy we have watched play out across a decade of launches, and the parts of it you can still fix.

A soft launch is not a bigger beta. It is a paid, live, revenue-generating test of whether your app can be bought profitably — run in a market small enough that being wrong is cheap. Here is how to pick the market, size the spend, and write the go and no-go gates before you start.

The first 100 users are not a smaller version of the first 100,000. They are a different job, done by hand, with no money. This is the playbook for that stage: the free rails both stores already give you, how to use communities without getting banned, what a Product Hunt or subreddit launch honestly returns, and the three gates you should clear before you spend a rupee on installs.