ASO agency India: why almost all of them are selling you a template.

I want to start with the part that is not the agencies’ fault. India has an enormous, talented, underpaid pool of digital marketers, and the global market has spent fifteen years telling them that the way to win is to be the cheapest. So they are. An ASO package from a Delhi, Bangalore, Jaipur or Hyderabad agency costs a tenth of a London one, and for a lot of founders reading this, that is the whole argument. I understand it. I also spend a large part of my year fixing what those packages leave behind, so let me describe it precisely.

The first thing you get is a keyword-stuffed listing. Indian agencies grew out of SEO shops, and SEO instincts applied to the App Store produce a specific, recognisable mess: a long description crammed with every term a tool suggested, a title with three keywords and no meaning, a subtitle that repeats the title, and a keyword field full of words the title already covers. Apple barely indexes the description. Google Play reads it, but rewards relevance, not density. The agency’s report will show ‘keywords tracked: 400’. Your install curve will show nothing.

The second thing you get is a screenshot set that looks like everyone else’s. Volume forces templates, and the Indian market runs on volume. The same layout, the same device frame, the same caption font, applied to a meditation app and a loan app and a cricket game. No hypothesis about what your category’s buyer needs to see first. No test. Just five frames delivered in a Google Drive folder with the word ‘final’ in the filename.

The third thing, and the one that worries me most, is the ‘guaranteed ranking’. Many Indian ASO packages quietly include incentivised installs, purchased reviews or rating campaigns, because that is the only way to guarantee a keyword position for fifteen thousand rupees. Those installs come from networks that Apple and Google spend real money detecting. The ranking arrives, the retention collapses, the store discounts the signal, and, sometimes, the developer account gets a warning that the agency will not be around to answer. Ask any Indian agency where its ‘boost’ installs come from and watch the reply get vague.

Here is why this happens, structurally. At the price point the market has set, an agency can only be profitable by running every client through the same pipeline with a junior at the controls. There is no room in a fifteen-thousand-rupee package for a senior person to read your reviews, open your five competitors and form an opinion about your category. Opinion is expensive. Templates are cheap. You get what the price can fund.

There are exceptions, and I have reviewed two of the better-known ones on this site. Studio Mosaic and AppFillip are real agencies with real founders who have stayed in the industry, and at their price they deliver a competent standard pass. But a competent standard pass is still a pass, still monthly, and still built for throughput rather than for your category. The gap between the best Indian agency and a good consultant who thinks about your app for three weeks is not a gap in talent. It is a gap in what the price allows.

So here is the honest comparison. An Indian retainer is cheaper per month than anything else on earth and runs for twelve months. My fee is fixed, ends, and buys the thing the retainer cannot afford: someone reading your category and making decisions about it. Over a year, the totals are closer than the monthly numbers suggest, and only one of them leaves your team knowing how to do the work. If your budget genuinely only stretches to the package, take the package and skip the boosts. If you can stretch further, send me your listing and I will show you what a template did to it.