Major brands may win by being featured in alternative app stores. They have no problems with guides of popular app stores, and even attracting users and generating more traffic doesn’t make much of a difference.

For many app developers, however, the key purpose of appearing on alternative app stores is seeking new traffic sources and audience touchpoints.

• Soft competition. To date, alternative app stores see way fewer apps than the App Store and Google Play. This fact offers you a great chance to capture your place in the vertical and attract untapped users.
• App promotion. Thanks to low competition, stores will help you promote your app by providing easier access to featuring.
• Income distribution models. Profits on alternative app stores are likely to be considerably lower than on the App Store and Google Play, given that there are no payment problems in the application. But on some stores the monetization fee is much less than on the App Store and Google Play, which take 15 to 30%, depending on profit and participation in special programs for developers). AppGallery, for instance, only starts charging the monetization fee from the second year and takes 10%.

Now let’s talk about the largest alternative app stores. We will look at each of them in terms of key parameters, including the size of the available audience, app publishing terms, and app page metadata requirements. Here we go!

An app store for Huawei devices is available in 170+ countries. Huawei originally released its own app store because Google revoked the company’s license.

It is currently one of the fastest-growing app stores due to the release of smartphones with AppGallery pre-installed. According to Huawei, 580 million people all over the world use AppGallery.

In the first year of hosting a non-gaming app, AppGallery does not charge a fee for in-app purchases. From the second year, the fee is 10%.

New features

• This is an optional field.
• It mustn’t be longer than 500 characters.

Telling about what’s new after an update can attract more users and generate more downloads. This section will appear on the AppGallery update screen.

To date, you want to use the procedure and logic of filling out the fields and building the semantic core as you do it for Google Play.

Visual metadata requirements

You can find the key requests in Huawei’s guidelines.

Icon

• Number: 1 icon.
• Resolution: 216 x 216 or 512 x 512.
• The icon should be square.
• Format: PNG.
• Max size: 2 MB.

Promotion video

• Optional element
• Number: 1 video
• Aspect ratio: 4:3
• Resolution: 1600 x 1200 or 1200 x 900
• Format: MOV or MP4.
• Duration: 15 seconds to 2 minutes
• Max size: 500 MB.

The promotion video will appear at the bottom of the app info page.

This app store was released by Xiaomi and is available on all Xiaomi and Redmi devices. By 2021, more than 190 million users were using this store.

GetApps has a developer support program under which the company provides grants to promote new products. No fee is charged on the store.

Textual metadata requirements

To date, GetApps guidelines don’t have any clear metadata criteria. We have collected information from the developer profile.

App name

• This is a required field. The name must comply with the store rules. For example, it mustn’t consist of the category name only (e.g., wifi.app).
• It mustn’t be longer than 50 characters.

One-line description

• This is a required field.
• Max length: 96 characters. GetApps advises to use up to 50 characters, given that the app name occupies more than 30 characters.
• The developer profile has a hint for this field: “The one-line description should objectively display the product features and capabilities, without excessive SEO or empty lines.”
• It is important not to use language related to eroticism, terror, violence, or rebellion in the brief description.

*Restrictions for Chinese characters FROM THE GUIDELINES:

3.2.2. The app name must contain up to 16 Latin characters or 8 Chinese characters. Otherwise, it will be rejected.
3.2.3. If the app name contains more than 16 Latin characters or 8 Chinese characters, it mustn’t have an additional description.

To date, you want to use the procedure and logic of filling out the fields and building the semantic core as you do it for Google Play.

There is no exact information on how keywords are indexed on GetApps.

Visual metadata requirements

Icon

• Number: 1 icon
• Resolution: 512 x 512
• The icon should be square
• Format: PNG

Screenshots

• Number: 3 to 8 screenshots
• Resolution: 1080×2400 or 1080×1920
• Format: PNG, JPG
• Max size: 2 MB

GetApps stipulates clear restrictions for image metadata that are described in paragraphs 3.2–3.3. For example, screenshots that do not correspond to the actual interface, as well as duplicate, incomplete, blurry, or stretched screenshots will be rejected during moderation.

Video

Video requirements are quite soft and described in the special guidelines.

• This is an optional element
• Number: 1 video
• Resolution: 720×1280 or 1080×1920 for vertical, 1280×720 or 1920×1080 for horizontal
• Format: YouTube URL
• Duration: 15 seconds to 2 minutes

The video appears on the app info page and is played automatically.

This is an app store for Android and Tizen. It is pre-installed on all Samsung devices and is available in 125 countries.

The fee charged is 30%.

Galaxy Store sees lower competition compared to other stores, which is an advantage for developers going to get featured.

Keywords

• This is a required field
• Max length: 60 characters; 5 keywords, each keyword has a separate field

Galaxy Store indexes the app name, keyword field, and description. To date, you want to use the procedure and logic of filling out the fields and building the semantic core as you do it for Google Play.

Visual metadata requirements

You can find the key requirements in the guidelines.

Icon

• Number: 1 icon
• Resolution: 512 x 512
• The icon should be square
• Format: PNG
• Max size: 1 MB

1. Metadata requirements and indexing principles on alternative stores are similar to those used on Google Play. This is why we recommend focusing on the popularity of requests in Google Play but keep in mind that the real popularity of keywords is lower on alternative app stores.

2. When building metadata, pay attention to similar apps on Google Play. Such analysis will help you with ASO on alternative app stores.

3. The algorithms for ranking alternative app stores are not fully known yet, so you need to test different hypotheses and examine the results.

Bonus! We’ve prepared a cheat sheet summarizing the article. The table shows information on text and image metadata on the App Store, Google Play, AppGallery, GetApps, and Galaxy Store.

This is everything we found about alternative app stores in public articles and guides. If you have experience with promoting apps on one of the stores we mentioned, we will appreciate you sharing your case in comments!