How to name an app and avoid the obvious mistake we made
Published 6th December, 2024 by Stuart Hall
Naming an app is HARD. There are so many things to consider, and weighing them all up is a balancing act ⚖️. I have made and launched 14 iOS apps that have received over 8 million downloads since 2010, and yet I still stumbled into an obvious pitfall (in hindsight, at least) when Claire and I chose a name for our new app. What we cover:
- Our Original App Naming Checklist
- How it Went
- How we chose the new name
- Day 1 results with our new name
- How to name an app - the NEW checklist:
- Conclusion
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We recently created and launched a new app called Morph (well, until this week... new name revealed below). Morph is an app for capturing progress photos over long periods of time. It has cool tools to help you get nicely aligned photos every time, and then makes a shareable video or gif out of each photo series. It also has some hard-core privacy settings, so if you want to use it for something sensitive like body/workout progress pics, you can make sure those images stay out of your camera roll and are locked behind FaceID. We debated long and hard about the name "Morph", even getting feedback from our TestFlight testers.
There were a heap of factors we considered when naming our app:
✅ Did we like it?
We both wanted a name that we felt confident about, so that we would be excited to tell people about it.
✅ Was it easy to remember?
Having a memorable name is important for word-of-mouth growth.
✅ Does it match what the app does?
We felt that a name that seemed related to what the app does would help to make it memorable.
✅ Is it easy to spell?
People often misspell Appbot, so we have experienced the challenges that come with that repeatedly. Everything from users being unable to find the app when they search, to having your brand misspelt in the press or on an award!
✅ Easy to pronounce?
Ditto the spelling comment above. We almost always have to spell "Appbot" out for people when we talk about it, because it's hard to pronounce clearly.
✅ Is it nice and short to save ASO characters?
We planned to run some ASO experiments to help the app rank in the App Store when a user searches for it. You have a total of 160 characters between the title (30 characters), subtitle (30 characters) and keywords field (100 characters).
✅ Could we find a half-decent domain name that included it?
This kinda depends on your definition of "half-decent" and heavily depends on how much you're willing to spend on the domain. We felt more pragmatic about this point than some of the others, and settled on "morphapp.net". It's not amazing, but it's reasonably short and easy to spell.
✅ Did it seem as though we could rank on Google for it?
SEO can help in a few different ways, though it's not critical for an app. Essentially, it's good to make sure that if someone did search for your app in Google, you have a hope of being on page 1.
❓ Are there many other apps named Morph?
The answer here was yes - a few apps included Morph in their name in the USA, but most of those apps were very small, with a handful of ratings. In short, we thought we could compete.
How it Went
TLDR; there was a BIG thing we didn't consider:
Are we going to be able to rank in the top couple of searches for our name? ❌❌❌
The app launched in mid-October. When you launch a new app in the App Store, Apple very kindly cuts you a break for the first week or so and pushes your new app up the rankings, so for the first week things were peachy. As soon as this honeymoon period ended we realised it was hard to find Morph by searching for the name and within a month it was obvious we needed to rename it; even after thousands of downloads, we still didn't rank for the search "morph" 😱!
In the end, what cemented the decision to rename the app was a request from one of our beta users for a way to share the app. She was telling friends about it, but neither she nor the people she told about Morph could find it in the store when they searched for the name. FAIL!
(Results from Astro - “#- Position” means you're not in the top #250 results for that search term 😭)Check out that keyword difficulty score for "morph", 97! Eeeeek. What were we thinking? Not our smartest move, in hindsight.
It seems really obvious to us now, but clearly it wasn't so obvious in the moment. When we talked through why we picked Morph, despite a competition score of 97, we went back and revisited all the other names we considered. We had the original “what are we gonna name this app?” Conversation from Slack pasted into a Basecamp task. The conversation was SO long that we put it in ChatGPT and asked it to make a list of the actual names we'd discussed and strip out all the debate about each one.
We had brainstormed 49 potential names. Yes, 49! 🤬
Each time we came up with a new idea we'd work our way through the list until we hit a deal breaker. That means we went through an average 50% of the checklist at the start of this post 49 times. We spent HOURS on this, and still screwed it up.
The big lesson? You don't need to just compete with apps named the same, you have to compete with anyone targeting that keyword.
Despite going through our checklist, we didn't consider that some of the factors on the list are more important than others. We are both very pattern-oriented thinkers. In the naming discussions the checklist was unintentionally grouped into questions around "How will we feel telling friends and family the name of the new app?" And then "...and what about all these practical things?".
How we chose the new name
We've decided to test Metamorph as the new name.
A search difficulty of 8 is hopefully more achievable. Here is how "metamorph" stacks up against our criteria, in revised order of importance:
✅ Can we compete on that term in App Store search (so users can find it by name)?
Whether or not there are other apps that use an exact match of "metamorph" in their name is part of this consideration, but this time we also made sure to take into account the keyword difficulty score (it's 8.. a lot better than 97!) and the number of apps ranking for that term in our decision-making. There are 13 apps competing for "metamorph", compared to 229 for "morph".
✅ Do we like it?
We both still feel that it's really important to choose a name that we're confident sharing, so this stays near the top of the list.
✅ Is it easy to spell?
Still very important. There would be no point ranking well for the name of the app if people can't spell it.
🟠 Is it easy to pronounce?
"Metamorph" isn't as easy to pronounce as "morph", but we don't think it's exactly difficult to pronounce either. We decided it was acceptable.
🟠 Is it easy to remember?
Similar to pronunciation... we're less confident "metamorph" is memorable than we were about "morph", but again decided it was acceptable.
❌ Is it nice and short to save ASO characters?
No way around this one, "metamorph" is not a short name at 3 syllables and 9 characters. We haven't found ASO characters to be really limiting for us though, especially not since we use some localizations for key markets.
✅ Does it match what the app does?
Yes, maybe even better than the original name.
✅ Did it seem as though we could rank on Google for it?
Yes, especially if someone searched "metamorph app" or "metamorph iOS app". At this stage we're not attempting to rank on Google for Metamorph, so this isn't a non-negotiable right now.
❓ Could we find a half-decent domain name that included it?
One work-around we tried to improve word-of-mouth sharing of Morph was adding the domain, morphapp.net, as the watermark on videos and gifs exported from Morph instead of the name of the app (which no-one could find if they searched for it). We then setup a redirect to point users to the App Store product page from that URL. This was a useful tactic, but the whole objective for changing the name was to rank in App Store search and avoid needing to use a workaround to help people find Metamorph. We have not yet purchased a new domain for Metamorph, and we're not sure if we will.
Day 1 results with our new name
We're writing this on day 1 after we updated to the new name, Metamorph.
Squee 🎉 We are ranked 4th for the exact match search term in the US:
Less commercially exciting, but still a nice win... We are ranked 1st for the exact match search term in Australia:
How to name an app - the NEW checklist:
Here's the list we will work through next time we make an app:
Non Negotiable's
Items on this list should not be ❌, but might sometimes be a 🟠. Aim for at least 3/5 ✅. These are ranked in rough priority order for us, though different apps will likely have slightly different priorities.
- ✅ Can we compete on that term in App Store search (so users can find it by name)?
- ✅ Do we like it?
- ✅ Is it easy to spell?
- ✅ Is it easy to pronounce?
- ✅ Is it easy to remember? and/or ✅ Does it match what the app does?
Nice To Haves
Items on this list might be a 🟠 or ❌, and that's OK. Ideally, of course, they would all be ✅.
- ✅ Is it nice and short to save ASO characters?
- ✅ Does it seem as though we could rank on Google for it?
- ✅ Can we find a half-decent domain name that included it?
Conclusion
I'll say it again, naming an app is HARD. Even with all our checklists and hours of debate, we still managed to trip over one of the most important things. Lesson learned: having a name you love isn't enough if no one can actually find it.
While we can't go back and fix Morph, we're feeling hopeful about Metamorph. A search difficulty of 8 feels way more achievable (fingers crossed 🤞).
If you're in the middle of naming your app, take it from us: don't just love the name, make sure it works for search too. And hey, if you screw it up like we did, at least you'll have a good story to tell. 😉
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About The Author
Stuart is Co-founder & Co-CEO of Appbot. Stuart has been involved in mobile as a developer, blogger and entrepreneur since the early days of the App Store. He built the 7 Minute Workout app in one night and blogged the story of growing the app to 2.3 million downloads before exiting to a large fitness device company. Previously he was the co-founder of the Discovr series of applications which achieved over 4 million downloads. You can connect with him on LinkedIn.
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