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app-store-featured

Prepare an app Product for App Store editorial featuring — readiness checklist, nomination pitch and a timing calendar.

Written by Kwern, after the skill of the same name in Eronred's aso-skills, MIT. Updated 2026-09-24.

The file, as Kwern runs it

Nothing below is rewritten or cut. The description a model routes on comes first, then the file itself. The whole thing, frontmatter included, is at /skills/app-store-featured.md.

description

Prepare an app Product for App Store editorial featuring — readiness checklist, nomination pitch and a timing calendar. Use for "get featured", "App of the Day", "Today tab", "Apple editorial", "nominate my app", "featuring pitch". For launch planning use launch; for the event cards that give self-serve featuring use in-app-events.

Raise the Product's odds of being picked by the App Store editorial team and pitch it at the right moment. Output is a featuring package: readiness checklist with the gaps to close first, the nomination pitch filled in field by field, and a timing calendar. The User submits the nomination in App Store Connect (Featuring nominations) or at developer.apple.com/contact/app-store/promote/; nothing is submitted by this Skill.

Gather

  1. read_context — positioning, ICP, founder story, roadmap and launch dates, Apple technologies the app uses when the Foundation doc names them.
  2. app_store_listing — rating, rating count, genres, the current version and its release notes (the most recent "What's New"). iTunes Lookup through fetch_url (https://itunes.apple.com/lookup?id=<App Store id>&country=<storefront>) adds currentVersionReleaseDate, the last update, and the screenshotUrls and artworkUrl512 to look at with view_image when scoring design quality.
  3. When the ASC Connector exists: connector_asc_in_app_events (events live and scheduled), connector_asc_product_pages (custom product pages), connector_asc_localizations (the locales covered) and connector_asc_screenshots (the screenshot and preview sets per locale). Without it, treat events and CPPs as absent and say the readiness score is missing that signal.
  4. connector_asc_reviews when available, else app_store_reviews — recurring crash or performance complaints, which editorial treats as disqualifying.
  5. connector_asc_analytics when available — the "App Store Browse" source line, the baseline a feature would lift.
  6. fetch_url on the app's public website or release notes when the Foundation doc leaves Apple technology adoption unknown — flagged untrusted, used only to list frameworks and platforms.

Anything the sources leave unknown (SwiftUI, widgets, accessibility support) is marked unverified in the checklist, never assumed.

Assess

Editorial criteria, placement types and the full checklist are in references/editorial-criteria.md; read it before scoring. Score five axes out of 10 — design quality, Apple technology adoption, quality signals, content and story, rating — and sum to a readiness score out of 50. A rating under 4.0, a crash pattern in reviews, or no update in the last 90 days is a blocker: the package leads with the fix and dates the pitch after it (see review-management, rating-prompt-strategy).

Pitch

The nomination form fields, the pitch text template and the timing rules are in references/pitch-and-timing.md; read it when drafting. Draft one pitch per moment in the next quarter, each led by the angle that fits it: a launch, an Apple OS release the app adopts on day one, a season, a cultural moment. Every claim in the pitch traces to a gathered fact (rating, rating count, a review quote, a release date).

Output: featuring package

  • Readiness — five axes scored, total out of 50, each gap tagged fix-first / improve / unverified.
  • Fix-first list — the blockers, ordered, each with the Skill or the App Store Connect field that closes it.
  • Nomination pitch — every form field filled, plus the plain-text pitch, with the story angle and the Apple technologies to highlight.
  • Timing calendar — next three months: pitch submission dates (six to eight weeks before the moment), the moment itself, and the in-app event or custom product page that supports it, by pointer to in-app-events and custom-product-pages.
  • Ongoing cadence — update rhythm, technology adoption roadmap, event rhythm.

Done when every checklist item is scored or marked unverified, every fix-first item names its owner, the pitch has every form field filled from gathered facts, and the calendar carries at least one dated pitch with its supporting event or page.

  • in-app-events — the event cards editorial surfaces on the Today tab and in search.
  • custom-product-pages — the page a feature story or a season lands on.
  • screenshot-optimization, app-icon-optimization, app-preview-video — the design-quality axis.
  • launch — the launch moment the pitch is timed against.
  • category-positioning — the editorial team that sees the app is the one for its category.
  • seasonal-aso — the seasonal moments in the calendar.

What it discloses

The Skill reads these files only when it needs them, so the model spends nothing on them the rest of the time.

  • references/editorial-criteria.md

  • references/pitch-and-timing.md

Someone is asking for what you built today.

On Reddit, on X, in ChatGPT's answers. Kwern finds them every morning and drafts the reply in your voice; you decide what goes out.