Studio Mosaic review: 850 apps and counting. Avoid being number 851 on the conveyor.

Studio Mosaic is one of the better-known ASO agencies to come out of India, and the founders have been at it since 2013. They have awards from the App Growth Awards in Berlin, a long list of client logos, and a number they are rightly proud of: more than 850 apps worked on. I want to take that number seriously, because it is the most honest thing on their site and it tells you exactly what kind of business you would be hiring.

Eight hundred and fifty apps over roughly twelve years is about seventy a year, more than one a week, every week, with a team that is not enormous. That is a throughput business. To sustain it, an agency has to standardise: an audit template, a keyword research process, a metadata format, a screenshot layout, a report. Standardisation is how you deliver seventy engagements a year without collapsing. It is also how every listing starts to look like every other listing the agency has touched, and why the client in month one gets the same playbook as the client in year twelve.

Depth is the casualty. Good ASO is category work. The keywords that matter for a meditation app are not the keywords that matter for a parking app, and knowing which claims convert in your category comes from having lived in it, not from running the template across it. A volume agency has breadth across categories and depth in almost none. Your listing gets the process. What it needs is someone who has read your reviews, opened your five competitors, and formed an opinion that the process could not.

Then there is the pricing, which is the reason most people consider an Indian agency in the first place. The retainers are lower than London or New York. That is real, and I will not pretend otherwise. But a lower retainer that runs for twelve months is still a retainer, and it still bills the months where the stores are quietly responding at the same rate as the months where the work happened. A cheap subscription to waiting is still a subscription to waiting.

Now picture one consultant who caps the client list on purpose, so volume can never become the model. The teardown of your listing and your five competitors, in your category, with an opinion. The rewrite, the test, the handover, with dates. You talk to the person doing the work. The fee is fixed and comparable to a few months of an offshore retainer, and when it ends your team owns the system and can run the next round without an agency at all.

In fairness: for a small app with a small budget that needs a competent, standardised ASO pass and a managed Apple Search Ads campaign, Studio Mosaic is a reasonable, experienced choice, and the award for Search Ads work was earned. If your listing needs category depth rather than a process, or you want the work to end when it is done, the volume model is the wrong shape. Send me their proposal and I will show you what the listing needs, and what it costs once.