ASO agency review · September 2026
Favoured is a London and Leeds full-funnel marketing agency founded in 2017 by a former Apple marketing lead. That credential is front and centre, and it works: clients assume that someone who worked at Apple must understand the App Store from the inside. Marketing at Apple and ranking in Apple’s store are different jobs. Read this before you pay for the badge.
Thinking about hiring Favoured? Avoid. Let me explain what ‘ex-Apple’ does and does not tell you.
Gabriel Machuret · September 2026Favoured leads with its founder’s Apple background, and I understand why. Nothing reassures a nervous founder like the idea that the person optimising their App Store listing used to work at the company that runs the App Store. So let me be precise about what that credential means, because it is the single most persuasive line in the pitch and the one that deserves the most scrutiny.
Apple is enormous. Its marketing organisation launches products, runs campaigns and manages brand. The App Store’s search and ranking systems are engineered by a different part of the company, are not shared with marketing staff, and are not shared with anyone outside Apple. A former Apple marketing lead knows how Apple markets. They do not carry a map of the search algorithm, and if anyone implies otherwise on a sales call, that is the moment to ask a harder question. ASO is learned the way everyone learns it: by shipping changes to hundreds of listings and watching what the store does.
The second thing to notice is the shape of the agency. Favoured is full-funnel: paid acquisition, conversion strategy, email and push automation, MarTech implementation, growth hacking. ASO is one service among six. That breadth is genuinely useful for a consumer brand that needs its whole lifecycle handled. For an app that needs its listing fixed, it means the retainer is designed to expand into CRM and paid the moment the organic work goes quiet, and organic work always goes quiet, because that is how the stores respond to a good change.
Then there is what full-funnel does to attention. An agency running your paid, your push notifications and your store listing reports on all three together. Installs went up, retention went up, revenue went up. Which lever did it? The report does not have to say, and the retainer does not have to shrink. Your listing might have been the reason. It might have been untouched since month two. From the outside, the blended dashboard looks the same either way.
Compare that with hiring one consultant whose entire job is the store. No Apple badge, and I would be suspicious of anyone who claims one gets them closer to the algorithm. What I have is a thousand audited listings, a method, and no other service to sell you. A teardown, a rewrite, a single screenshot hypothesis measured on conversion, and a handover with dates. You can see exactly what the organic work did because nothing else in the report is moving. The fee is fixed and small next to a year of retainers, and your team owns the system when it ends.
In fairness: if you are a consumer brand that wants paid, CRM automation and store presence handled by one London team with a strong brand-marketing instinct, Favoured is a credible option and the founder’s background is a real asset for the brand side of that work. If you are here because your App Store listing is the problem, the badge is not the fix. Send me their proposal and I will show you what the ASO line costs on its own.
02 — Red flags in a credential-led proposal
If you see three, send it to me03 — What the Apple badge says vs what your listing gets
Hover a row to unredactApple marketing is not App Store search engineering. Nobody outside the ranking team has the algorithm, and the ranking team does not do sales calls. ASO is learned by shipping, not by badge.
Translation: Badge ≠ algorithmSix services, one retainer, one blended report. Convenient for the agency, which never has to show what the organic work did on its own.
Translation: Blended hides the leverA phrase that sells energy. Store listings do not respond to hacks. They respond to a properly rewritten title, a tested first screenshot, and patience.
Translation: No hacks in the store04 — Where a full-funnel retainer actually goes
Typical agency economics · illustrative, not their booksKeeping the Apple story in front of prospects: content, PR, awards, directory profiles.
CRM, MarTech and paid teams that must be staffed to be sold, funded by every retainer.
Your point of contact, blending six services into one monthly story.
Overhead, tools, and the owners’ return.
The ASO specialist actually changing your store. Just over a quarter.
05 — Favoured vs one consultant
Same goal: more installs from search06 — Fair play — what Favoured genuinely does well
Credit where it is due07 — Should you avoid Favoured?
Honest answer: depends who you are07 — Before you sign
I will separate the store work from the funnel, tell you what the listing needs on its own, and quote it as a fixed fee. If a full-funnel team is what you need, I will say so.
08 — Objections
They know Apple. The ranking systems are engineered separately and shared with no one. Ask on the call what specifically they learned inside Apple that applies to search ranking, and listen carefully to the answer.
Efficient for the agency. Every added service is revenue without a new pitch. If you only need the listing fixed, buy only that.
No. I do the listing, the keywords, the creative testing and the training. If you need lifecycle marketing done well, an agency like Favoured is a real option for it.
Yes. I compete for ASO work. That is why the argument is about what a credential can and cannot mean, not about competence, and why I have said who should hire them.