Angle Agency review: ‘ASO 2.0’ from 200 remote experts. Avoid paying for the version number.

Angle has a pedigree worth respecting. Sergey Sharov built Asodesk, one of the better-known ASO tools in the Russian-speaking market and beyond, and Michael Shubin ran mobile marketing at ABBYY and has worked Apple Search Ads since the day it launched. These are people who understand the stores from the inside of the data. So when their agency calls its main service App Store Optimization 2.0 and advertises more than two hundred experts across twenty countries, I want to look carefully at both claims, because the founders’ credibility is being spent on them.

Start with the version number. There is no ASO 2.0. The stores have changed over the years, in-app events, custom product pages, promotional content, but the discipline underneath is what it always was: a well-judged title, subtitle and keyword field, a first screenshot that makes a tested claim, and patience while the stores respond. Calling that 2.0 is positioning. It suggests the other agencies are doing something obsolete and this one has a new method. When you ask what the new method is, you will hear the old method with better tooling, which is fine, and not a version change.

Now the headcount. Two hundred experts, fully remote, in twenty countries. That is either a very large agency or a very large network of contractors, and for your purposes the distinction matters less than what it implies: your account will be staffed from a pool, coordinated by a manager, following a process that lets two hundred people deliver consistently. Consistency is the enemy of category judgment. Your listing needs one person to think about your reviews and your five competitors for a while. A pool delivers a workflow.

The founders’ tool background shapes the work in a second way. Tool-builders think in tool categories: semantic cores, keyword clusters, tracked positions, seasonal campaigns. Those are useful inputs, and holiday ASO campaigns in particular are a real tactic. But tool-led work drifts toward what the tool measures, which is rankings, and away from what you want, which is installs. The report will be rich in positions and clusters. Ask what the first screenshot claims, and why.

Compare that with hiring one consultant who has never needed a version number. A teardown that reads your category, a rewrite that acts on it, one test that proves it, and a handover that leaves it with your team. No pool, no coordinator, no semantic core delivered as a spreadsheet in place of a decision. The fee is fixed and a fraction of a year’s retainer, and when it ends your team owns the reasoning and can run the next round with any tool, including Asodesk if it fits.

In fairness: the founders are genuinely expert, the Apple Search Ads capability is real, and for a multi-market app that needs localization at scale run by a large distributed team, Angle’s size is a practical advantage. If you want judgment on one listing rather than a workflow from a pool, and you would rather not pay for a version number, the shape is wrong. Send me their proposal and I will show you what the 1.0 work costs on its own.