How does Apple choose the apps that they feature in the App Store?

Our language development app, FreeSpeech, just got featured by Apple - #1 in their "Best New Apps" category!

Not sure how typical our journey is but here's what we did. We've been developing apps for the iPad in the autism / special needs space for about 5 years now. And we'd seen some traction internationally with our old app Avaz during that time. However, despite a consistent track record of updating the app pretty much every month and being way ahead of our competition, we never seemed to attract Apple's attention. In spite of having a couple of very close friends within Apple, we were unable to connect with anyone in the App Store teams. We were at our wits' end.

When we developed FreeSpeech, we decided we wanted to make a final, superhuman effort to come to Apple's attention. I mined all my contacts to find someone who could introduce me to a real person within Apple who could help me. I finally found a friend of a friend who was an iOS evangelist, and I got a warm intro to him.

That intro was literally like turning on a light switch in a dark room. This was several months before the app actually went live; he asked for a TestFlight invite and then gave me a couple more email ids of Apple folks to whom he asked me to send a TestFlight invite. Every time we released a new beta, they would get an update. I never did hear from any of the other email ids, but I could see that at least one of them was installing our betas.

When the app was launched, I was crushed to see that we weren't featured. But about a week after that, I happened to go to the Bay Area on work, and I wrote to my evangelist friend and asked him if I could meet anyone in their Cupertino office. Very luckily for me, he was able to get someone high up in their Developer Relations Education team to meet with me. I had a truly lovely meeting with this person, who also promised to show the app around within Apple.

When I came back to India, I was told that a team from Apple would be visiting Mumbai to meet with some of the most interesting developers here. By a very fortunate coincidence, we were able to get a big breakthrough in sales of Avaz to the Indian government at around the same time, so we were able to talk to Apple's marketing and PR teams about it.

All this built up and when we launched our next update, 2 weeks after the original launch date, we got a request for Promotional Artwork - and we knew something big was brewing :-). In a couple of days after that, we were #1 on the App Store - not just in education or special ed (our primary categories), but on the Main page!

Here are my learnings about how to get featured by Apple:

1. Having someone inside Apple to push for you helps a great deal. Find a contact inside, however hard it is. The more people that see your app within Apple, the better. I still have very little idea how the network is within Apple, but the only thing I can tell is that there are multiple ways to the top.
2. Having a truly wonderful and unique app is definitely the first step. In particular, Apple is very very particular on great artwork and impeccable design. They love to feature apps that make their devices look good!
3. Having a solid marketing plan helps a lot. We shared a solid plan with them, and we were able to leverage on my TED talk to get a burst of extra publicity.
4. Apple loved the depth of research behind my app - I think the fact that we had spent 5 years understanding this space, and publishing papers, research, intervention studies etc, really went a long way.
5. We are going to release a Mac app of FreeSpeech soon. I believe the combination of being exclusive to iOS, combined with a strong roadmap to support their entire hardware suite, made a big impact.

Getting featured, for us, was less about luck and more about some very hard work and pushing along multiple fronts. It take a lot to get featured by Apple. But it's totally worth it!