Lessons from reviewing 10+ press kits

I asked fellow iOS devs on Twitter to send me their press kits for review. Below are the most common tips and feedback that I gave.

I have structured this based on the “content-type” for easier reference.

Text overview/description

Two things come to mind right away. Some press kits had a brief description of the app; it wasn’t immediately clear without studying the screenshots or even the App Store description of what the app does.

Another frequent was unclear pricing and explanation of what you get for free and what is paid. This means you should share all your in-app purchases pricing and at least a basic breakdown showing what your app offers for free. (Assuming this applies to your app, of course).

My other recommendation was to add bullet lists of features to quickly show what your app offers without needing to read paragraphs of texts. These are also great for citation in the article.

For more details you visit my guide: How to prepare text overview

If you want a quick start, here is a free online tool to help.

Screenshots and other assets

The most important feedback was to provide plain screenshots without any edits or device frames. Feel free to include those as well, but only as an addition.

A couple of press kits also had tiny preview sizes for the screenshots, so it was hard to see the actual content. Ease of download is another crucial factor. Ideally, it would be best if you had dedicated download buttons for each screenshot (perhaps even with info about size and dimensions).

TIP: You can use the attribute download on your a HTML tags, which will tell the browser to download the file instead of previewing it in a new window.

Quite a few press kits had an option to download all screenshots at once or based on a platform. I don’t think this is needed as articles typically use two or three screenshots. If you do this, don’t forget to name your archive with the name of your app. If you call it media.zip, it might get lost once downloaded among other media folders.

Clear naming also applies to individual screenshots. Make sure to prefix them with the name of your app, and it will be much easier to find them in the Downloads folder for the journalists. It is all about reducing the friction to write about your app.

Guide: Images to include in a press kit

Miscellaneous

And lastly, let’s go over things that don’t fit well into other categories. If you have YouTube videos, it might be good to display previews for at least some of them (you can get the iframe code from YouTube when sharing) or “borrow” it here.

This wasn’t common, but it is important: Don’t forget to provide an App Store download link.

Although the “Press Kit Review” offer is officially over, I am happy to talk press kits any time. Feel free to get in touch.