User Profile

For the past 2 years my team and have been trying to solve the mystery as to why our app went from sitting at #2 for years for a search term to dropping to #7. We are a small bootstrapped team of 3. Our revenue has dropped over 50% because of this and despite making huge improvements to the app + marketing, I am on the verge of having to lay my team off because of the impact this drop has had on our business. We are the top rated app in our category and have thousands of more reviews than the apps sitting above us. There are apps that have only 3 reviews with 2-star ratings sitting above my app thats has a 4.8 rating with almost 10K reviews. We have good engagement, have the highest conversion in sales compared to all the other apps in our category. We have hired multiple ASO + ad agencies. We've done Meta ads, Search Ads. We've done all the A/B testing. We've tested icons. We've tested keywords, titles and subtitles. influencer campaigns. Creating our own affiliate campaign. Having SEO on our website for the app. We have the search term in our titles. We've updated onboarding to increase engagement (i.e. removing the need to create an account). We are the only app in our category with a presence on social. When our organic downloads started to decrease it was shortly after an app overseas copied tutorials from our app and put them into theirs. I disputed with Apple Legal to get resolved. Apple Legal left it between us and other app to resolve and eventually after getting my lawyer involves, they took them out after some hash communication on their end. I suspect they are doing something shady against us to make our ranking drop? I will also add the ranking only dropped in the USA which is our main market for revenue. On top of this, a new app popped out of nowhere and voilated guideline 3.1.2.a where they were forcing users for written reviews in order to unlock features. It took Apple almost 6 months to resolve this, meanwhile, they were raking up thousands of reviews and jumped in the top 3 apps. Apple eventually got them to release a version of the app without the violation BUT they were able to keep their thousands of reviews? I have an apple rep who does her best to advocate for me and I was even at WWDC23 and talked to the App Store team. They didn't do much or offer any advice on what else I could be doing to get my rankings back up. I'm sick of people that are doing shady shit and getting away with it. Apple is not regulating and it's hurting small businesses that are running their business with integrality. I'm sorry for this long rant, but has anybody else experienced this and were you able to get your ranking back up? I would love to chat and talk solutions.