I want to change my app category. What are the main consequences?

From a Business and brand perspective, my app fits better under Lifestyle than Productivity - that is the current category. From a completely logical, binary, black and white POV, it's a productivity app. But, it only fits a certain kind of lifestyle, which is the reason that I want to change the category.


My concerns:

  • Is there a change of Apple penalizing me after changing it?
  • How does this change affect my overall ranking? Ofc my app will not have a good ranking at first - because of keywords and the other variables, but will my number of downloads in the previous category come together to the new one?
  • Will my reviews follow to the new category?


If you have any experience with it, please, share. I couldn't find anything similar.

Thank you so much!


Rafael

Replies

'category' is locked, meaning an update/new version has to be pushed in order to change that meta data.


'reviews' will follow the app, but as they are version-specific, they are tied to the version they were received for.


We assume ranking is affected when a new version is pushed, but the store is a black box otherwise.

One of my greatest frustrations with the app store is that categories have no value whatsoever. Search results are not grouped by category, so games typically swamp all search results and all categories along with it. Apple should sort iTunes Store app search results by category instead of just providing a long list. It would allow searchers to find the type of app they're actually looking for, and allow non-game developers' apps to get discovered easier. Grrrrrr.

I don't think this is true anymore. We've changed one of our apps category and we lost our rankings for that category (zero'd).

Now we want to go back to the original category but are unsure if we're gonna get back our original ranking or start from scratch.

Can anyone please confirm this?

In regards to the above comment about losing category rankings, that is sadly true.

If you change your apps' category, you will be completely unlisted from the original category, and will have to start gaining ranking in the new category. Essentially your app is seen as being brand new, and will have to regain all it's rankings again.