It is a fact that mobile is the new era in daily human interaction with technology, and mobile apps are the strength that empower those mobiles to function and perform many tasks, it’s also “confirmed that number of mobile devices used to access the internet will overtake the number of desktop devices, for the first time in the history of the web.”(Wamda), while we speak there are 775.000 app available on the appstore But the real question is how to compete with all other apps available on the appstore?! Especially for those who launch Arabic mobile apps?

1. Shine like a star on search: appearing on the first result of searches is not an easy task on apple appstore, due to the competition and the search volume of each keyword, but this is only a part of the story when it comes to Arabic language, because the search function on appstore doesn’t gather several quires and consider them as one or related ones, such as what Google does, the result of this function will force Arab apps developers to consider different spellings for Arabic words, even the small ones, such as اذكار and أذكار with or without the "ء" To overcome this, Arab developers should use several tools to figure out the search volume and competition for each inserted keyword, by using https://appstorerankings.net which allows you to analyze and discover the search volume, competition, and how many apps are using the same keyword to decide on which Arabic spelling the keyword should be inserted.
2. Choose your road to success: choosing the right category to list your app on is as much important as choosing the right keywords, due to the fact that choosing the right one would affect directly the amount of downloads per day to result in trending the app. The volume of competition between each category is determent by the amount of apps available, the demand by users, how relevant the category to the app and how many downloads needed to trend on that category. However, sadly the only way to know which category your app must be in is through experiments by changing the category each time you upload a new release, which leaves a room for startups to consider this gap.
3. Choose your land of fighting: Saying I want to target the Arab world is not enough; you should focus your efforts on a specific geographic area to be the big fish in the small bowl and heavily drive all your marketing materials to be delivered to that area through press releases, social media, SEO, Mobile search ads…etc.
4. Integrate SEO and social media: as researches tell, users are more likely to download an app if it was referred by a friend, so your focus is to influence and track users to specific shareable points through user experience flows in the app, and empower them to share more, but to narrow downloads, you should implement an integrated marketing strategy to insure that regardless from where users came, they will result on downloading the app, here are few ideas on how to do the integration:

• Create a landing page for the app; it should also be mobile friendly.
• Use a dedicated web pages for content (If app is user generated content) and SEO those pages.
• Include social media sharing in the app for each content/action.

All in all, this process of generating new downloads to your app to result in raking better in the store, being more visible is always a continues work that never ends, so if you have more ideas on how to also sustain and generate downloads to your app in order to compete, I’d much love to hear.

Resources:

http://www.wamda.com/2013/02/how-mobile-is-changing-business-infographic

http://www.mobilemarketingwatch.com/app-store-rankings-impacted-by-ios-6-25794/

http://readwrite.com/2013/01/08/google-play-to-hit-1-million-apps-before-apple-app-store

http://readwrite.com/2013/01/07/apple-app-store-growing-by