lopu built a genuinely useful meal planner. The App Store can't find it.

lopu: Weekly Meal Plan & Prep

Dmytro Kobets

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lopu is a weekly meal planning app: pick your days, get dinner ideas, build a grocery list that's grouped by aisle instead of just being a flat list of items. It reads like something a parent who's tired of the "what's for dinner" question every night would actually use. The feature set is solid, the description is specific instead of vague, and it supports English, Polish, and Ukrainian.

None of that is the problem. The problem shows up the moment you check where the app actually sits in the App Store — not by opening it and looking around, but by asking the same two questions any App Store search algorithm asks: is this app in the chart, and does this app show up when someone searches for what it does.

Where lopu sits in the chart

lopu lives in the Food & Drink category. Here's its chart position in the top-free ranking, by country:

#9 in Ukraine looks great next to "not ranked" everywhere else — but before reading that as a growth win, look at what it's actually being compared to. Ukraine's Food & Drink chart is smaller and thinner than the US one: fewer apps competing for it, and the developer is Ukrainian, which usually means the first real users came from a home audience that already trusts the app before day one. A strong result in your own market isn't proof the App Store algorithm rewards you everywhere. It's proof you had a head start in one place.

The US and UK numbers matter more, and they're worth a second look before assuming lopu is simply "losing" there. Pull up the US Food & Drink top-free chart and scroll through the top 30: McDonald's, DoorDash, Chipotle, Taco Bell, Grubhub, Uber Eats, Starbucks. It's almost entirely food-ordering and rewards apps. A meal planner competing for chart position in that category is competing against apps whose entire purpose is completely different from its own — different intent, different install trigger, different everything. Chart position in Food & Drink was never going to be how a meal planner gets found. That's a category-browsing metric, and almost nobody browses Food & Drink to find a meal planner. They search for one.

The real test: does search find you at all

This is the part that actually matters, and it's also the part most indie devs never check before shipping. Search Rank isn't a score from 1 to 100 — it's binary first. Either the App Store's search index has decided your app is a match for a term, or it hasn't. If it hasn't, you don't rank "low" for that keyword. You don't exist for it. No amount of quality fixes that on its own.

Here's what checking lopu against the obvious terms for its category turned up:

One keyword out of five has any visibility, and it's the longest, most specific phrase on the list. Everything shorter and more obvious — the terms someone actually types into the App Store search bar when they want this kind of app — comes back empty.

Same category, same size of team, same rough launch window. One app owns the head keyword outright. The other isn't indexed for it at all. That gap has nothing to do with which app is better built or which one has more features — it comes down to something much more boring: what words are sitting in the title and subtitle.

Why one app is invisible and the other isn't

App Store search reads your title, subtitle, and the hidden keywords field. That's essentially the whole surface it has to match your app against what someone typed. Look at the subtitles side by side:

• mise: "mise meal planner" — reads a little redundant to a human, but it puts the exact phrase "meal planner" directly into the field the algorithm weighs most.
• lopu: "Not sure what to cook tonight" — good, human copy, the kind of line that might actually convert someone once they've already found you. Zero searchable nouns in it.

This is the single most common mistake in ASO for people building apps without a marketing background: writing the subtitle like ad copy instead of like a set of search terms. Ad copy is for the moment someone's already looking at your listing. The subtitle's real job happens before that — it's one of the main inputs deciding whether your listing shows up at all.

Before you copy the "winning" keyword — check if it's actually worth winning

It would be easy to end this with "add 'meal planner' to your subtitle and move on." But pulling Google Trends on the two obvious candidates tells a more useful story:

"meal planner" — flat, low interest, sitting around 2–4 out of 100 for the past several months.
"meal prep" — consistently 65–99 out of 100, and climbing through the summer.

mise's #1 ranking for "meal planner" is a real result, but it's the top spot in a small pond. "meal prep" is the term with actual, rising demand — and neither app has claimed it. mise sits at #32 in the US and #16 in the UK for it. lopu isn't indexed for it at all. That's the open lane, not the keyword mise already won.

One more gap worth flagging: "grocery list" is core to what both apps do — it's in both app descriptions as a headline feature — and neither app is indexed for it in the US or UK. Nobody's claimed it. When a keyword is directly tied to your actual functionality and shows up with a null result for every app in your space, that's usually not a sign the term is worthless. It's a sign nobody's bothered to put it in their metadata yet.

What to actually check before you assume your app is "just not growing"

If you shipped an app and installs are flat, this is the cheap check to run before touching the product:

• Pull up your title and subtitle and read them as a stranger typing into search, not as marketing copy. If the words someone would search for your app category aren't literally present in one of those two fields, that's usually the first fix — not a redesign, not a new feature.
• Check whether you're indexed at all for your obvious keywords, not just where you rank. A null result and a #180 result look similar from the inside — "nobody's finding me" — but they mean different things and get fixed differently.
• Don't assume the term your closest competitor ranks #1 for is the term to chase. Check real search demand first. Sometimes the visible leader picked the smaller, easier race.
• If your app lives in a category chart dominated by a completely different kind of app, stop optimizing for chart position there. Put that effort into search instead — that's where your actual users are looking.

None of this required touching lopu's code, design, or feature set. The app already does what it says it does. It's just wearing a subtitle that was written for a human reading a listing, in a field that's mostly read by an algorithm deciding whether to show that listing in the first place.

Data pulled from live App Store chart and search results via Pumf.it on August 21, 2026. This is a read of public App Store data, not a critique of lopu as a product — the app itself looks well made. The gap described here is a search-indexing issue, and it's a fixable one.