Dot Com Infoway review: an IT company that sells ASO. Avoid buying craft from a generalist.

Dot Com Infoway is a serious company in its own field. Founded in 2000, CMMI Level 3 certified, more than two decades of software and web development, offices in India and the United States, and a stack of directory reviews from clients who were happy with the engineering. I have no argument with any of that. My argument is with the mobile app promotion menu bolted onto it, and specifically with buying App Store Optimization from a company whose core competence is building software.

Generalist IT firms add marketing services for a sensible business reason: clients who had an app built ask what to do next, and it is easier to sell them the next thing than to refer them out. So a marketing division appears, staffed by people who are competent at digital marketing in general. ASO becomes one service in that division, alongside SEO, social media, PPC and influencer campaigns. Every one of those is a different discipline, and ASO is the one most easily faked, because a keyword tool and a template produce something that looks like the work.

What ASO actually needs is a decade of watching two stores change their ranking behaviour, and the judgment that comes from it. Which three terms belong in a title in your category. What claim the first screenshot should make. Whether your listing is the problem or your product is. A marketing division at an IT firm has SEO instincts, and SEO instincts applied to app stores produce a specific kind of mistake: keyword stuffing in descriptions that the stores barely index, backlink thinking that has no equivalent, and monthly reports built around metrics that matter for websites and not for apps.

The retainer model does the rest. A monthly fee for ‘app promotion’ covers ASO, PR outreach, some social posts and perhaps an influencer mention. The bundle makes each line hard to evaluate, and a report that always has a press mention or a social post to show never has to answer the question that matters: what changed on the listing last month, and what did it do to search installs?

Compare that with hiring one consultant who does nothing but the stores. A teardown of the listing, a rewrite of the fields the stores rank, one creative test, and a handover your team can repeat. The report contains what shipped to the listing and what it did, and nothing else, because nothing else is moving. The fee is fixed and comparable to a few months of a bundled retainer, and when it ends your team can run the next round.

In fairness: if Dot Com Infoway built your app and you want a light marketing pass from the same vendor while you find your feet, that convenience is real and the company is stable and reputable. If your listing is what needs work, buy the craft from someone whose only craft it is. Send me their proposal and I will show you what the ASO line would need to contain to be worth anything.