ASO agency review · September 2026
AppAgent is a Prague-based agency that works exclusively with mobile games, with Supercell and Netflix Games on the client list and an App Marketing Agency of the Year award on the shelf. That focus is exactly why most of the people reading this page should not hire them, and why the ones who should still need to read the fee breakdown first.
Thinking about hiring AppAgent? Avoid, unless you are a game studio. Even then, read this.
Gabriel Machuret · September 2026AppAgent does one thing, and it says so on the front page: mobile games. Founded in Prague in 2016, the agency has supported more than 150 games across strategy, creative and growth, and its client list reads like the top of the grossing chart. If you run a fitness app, a fintech product or a language-learning tool, I can save you the sales call. They are not built for you, they will tell you as much, and you would be paying games-studio rates for a team whose instincts were trained on player psychology rather than on your category.
If you are a game studio, keep reading, because the picture is more interesting. AppAgent’s real strength is creative production. Trailers, preview videos, localized screenshot sets, the visual layer of a store listing. In games, that visual layer is most of ASO, because conversion on a game page is won or lost in the first three seconds of the video. So the agency is honest about where its value is. The problem is how that value is priced.
A creative-led agency carries a creative-led cost base. Art directors, motion designers, video editors, localization managers, and the producers who coordinate all of them. That is a studio, and a studio has to be kept busy. Your retainer funds the bench between projects as well as the work on your listing. When the store page needs one new video and two screenshot tests this quarter, you are still paying for the capacity to produce ten.
There is a second issue, subtler. Metadata work in games, the keyword field, the title, the localized subtitles across thirty storefronts, is unglamorous and cheap to do well. At a creative agency it gets bundled in and done by the strategist between video reviews. You can end up with a beautiful trailer sitting on top of a keyword set nobody has seriously interrogated since launch. The video is what gets shown in the case study. The keyword field is what quietly decides whether anyone sees the video.
Compare that with hiring one consultant. I am not a video studio, and I will not pretend to be. What I do is the part that does not need one: the keyword architecture across storefronts, the screenshot hypotheses, the test plan, and the honest read on whether your current creative is the problem or your visibility is. Fixed scope, fixed fee. If the answer is that you need a new trailer, I will tell you, and you can commission one from a studio that charges per video instead of per month.
To be fair to AppAgent: for a studio with a live-ops title, an ongoing creative pipeline and the budget to keep a production team busy, they are an excellent choice and their games-only focus is a genuine edge. For a studio with one or two titles that need the store page fixed, and for every non-game app that found this page, the retainer buys capacity you will not use. Send me their proposal and I will show you which lines are creative you need and which are studio overhead.
02 — Where a creative-agency retainer actually goes
Typical agency economics · illustrative, not their books03 — What the showreel says vs what ships to your listing
Hover a row to unredactThe trailers are genuinely good. They are also the expensive, visible part of the work, and the case study is built around them. The keyword field that decides whether anyone sees the trailer does not make the showreel.
Translation: Showreels hide metadataA real edge for games. A real disqualifier for everything else. If your app is not a game, the instincts, benchmarks and creative playbooks were trained on the wrong audience.
Translation: Focus cuts both waysCapacity to produce a lot of creative, every month. If your listing needs one video and two tests this quarter, you are paying for the pipeline, not the output.
Translation: You fund the bench04 — AppAgent vs one consultant
Same goal: more installs from search05 — Red flags in a games-agency proposal
If you see three, send it to me06 — Fair play — what AppAgent genuinely does well
Credit where it is due07 — Should you avoid AppAgent?
Honest answer: depends who you are07 — Before you sign
I will tell you which lines are creative you actually need, which are studio capacity, and what the metadata and testing work costs as a fixed fee. If you are a studio that needs the pipeline, I will say so.
08 — Objections
For creative production, probably. For keyword architecture and testing discipline, a specialist in your category is not automatically a specialist in your store page. Ask who owns the metadata and how often it has changed on their reference accounts.
No. I brief them, test them and tell you whether they are the problem. Production is a per-piece purchase from a studio, and it should be priced that way, not folded into a monthly fee.
Their positioning says games only. If they make an exception, ask why, and ask which benchmarks they will use for your category.
Yes. I compete for ASO work. That is why the criticism is about creative-agency economics and category fit, not competence, and why I have said clearly which studios should hire them.