It is uncomfortable for an engineering-led studio to accept, but for a consumer app the store listing is not marketing collateral wrapped around the product. For most of the people who will ever encounter you, it is the product.
They see a search result, then a set of screenshots, then they decide. The decision takes about a second and happens before a single line of your code runs.
What we changed once we believed it
Screenshots argue, they do not document
The instinct is to show the app: here is the home screen, here is the settings page. Nobody has ever installed an app because of its settings page.
Each screenshot has to make one claim, in words large enough to read at thumbnail size, with the interface supporting the claim rather than being the claim. "Your face. Your body. Not a model." is an argument. A screenshot captioned "Gallery" is a filing label.
The first two screens carry everything
Most people never swipe. Whatever the objection is that stops someone from installing, it has to be answered in the first two frames. For our bridal product the objection is that AI images will flatter you into a dress that will not suit you, so the second frame says the app does no smoothing and no slimming. That is the sale.
Copy the reviewer reads is copy the user reads
Store review reads your listing and your empty states with more care than most users do. When we ported our disc golf app to pickleball, the highest-risk string in the whole codebase was the history screen's empty state, still telling pickleball players to record their first throw. Every new user sees it. So does every reviewer.
The part that is genuinely hard
Good store screenshots require real footage of real usage, and that is a dependency you cannot engineer your way around. Our pickleball product sat finished for weeks: code complete, payments verified end to end against a real purchase, and deliberately unshipped, because we did not yet have court footage worth putting on the listing.
Holding a finished build is uncomfortable and it was the right call. Shipping to a listing that does not convert does not get you data, it gets you a listing with no downloads and a handful of reviews you cannot interpret. It launched when the footage was there, not when the code was.
You can fix a feature after launch. You cannot fix a first impression that nobody clicked on.