Can I post my app on r/androiddev?

Only if the post is about Android engineering rather than about your app. r/androiddev carries a strict tolerance and removes app-marketing submissions with no technical content, so a launch or a Play Store link goes quickly. A writeup of a Compose problem you solved, a Play Console policy fight, or a library you open sourced is welcome, and your app can be the thing that produced the problem.

How do I get beta testers on Reddit?

Not in the developer subs. r/betatests and r/AlphaandBetaUsers exist specifically so people can be recruited, and a direct ask there is the expected format rather than a violation. Say what the app does, which platform and OS version you need, and what kind of feedback you are after — vague "try my app" posts get ignored even in communities that permit them.

Where can I promote a mobile app on Reddit?

r/AppBusiness is the strongest option tagged for mobile: it is built for ASO, monetisation and acquisition, so naming your own app inside a case study is on-topic there. r/mobiledev takes cross-platform build stories. The four framework and platform subs — r/androiddev, r/iOSProgramming, r/FlutterDev, r/reactnative — are technical-content-only, which means you can reach them but not with a launch.

Can I ask people on Reddit to leave my app a review?

No. Soliciting store reviews breaks both Apple and Google review policies, and on Reddit an organised ask for upvotes or downloads is treated as brigading, which can escalate past a single subreddit. Ask instead for something specific a stranger can do in five minutes, like reproducing a bug on a device you do not own.

Should I post my app to both r/androiddev and r/iOSProgramming?

Not the same post. Duplicating one submission across two overlapping subs is what rate-based spam filters look for, and neither community wants the launch anyway. Write the Android post about an Android problem and the iOS post about an iOS problem, days apart, or put the cross-platform decision in r/mobiledev once.

How to promote a mobile app on Reddit without getting banned

The mobile version of this problem has a specific shape: the subreddits with mobile people in them are not the subreddits that will let you post about your app. r/androiddev and r/iOSProgramming are where the developers are, and both remove app-marketing submissions that carry no technical content — which describes almost every launch post ever written.

So the store link goes up anyway, it disappears within the hour, and the conclusion people draw is that Reddit hates apps. Reddit does not hate apps. It removes submissions whose entire content is a link to something you want money for, and an App Store listing is the purest example of that object on the internet.

There is one place tagged for this niche where your own numbers are the point rather than the violation. r/AppBusiness exists for ASO, monetisation and user acquisition, and naming your app inside a case study is on-topic there by design. Most of the fix is noticing that the technical subs and the business sub want opposite posts, and writing two different ones instead of one that suits neither.

Where mobile apps can actually be promoted

Each of these is a real community with its own rule. The rule is the part that matters — a good post in the wrong thread is still a removed post.

r/AppBusinessConditional
The one community tagged for mobile where the commercial side of your app is the subject matter. ASO, monetisation and acquisition are what it is for, so your own install and revenue numbers belong here.
The rule here: Name your app freely, but the post has to be a case study — installs, keyword movement, CPI, conversion, what you changed. A bare download link with no business detail is what gets removed.
r/mobiledevConditional
Smaller and cross-platform, so a build story that spans iOS and Android has somewhere to go without being duplicated into two platform subs.
The rule here: Post the cross-platform decision, not the app: why you picked the framework, what it cost you, what you would not do again. Repeated bare download-link posts are the thing that gets pulled.
r/androiddevStrict
Where Android engineers are, and worth the effort for exactly that reason — but they are there for the engineering, not for your launch.
The rule here: The post needs real Android substance — a Compose or Play Console problem you solved, a library you open sourced. App marketing with no technical content is removed on sight.
r/iOSProgrammingStrict
The iOS mirror of the above, and the best audience anywhere for App Review and Swift specifics.
The rule here: Swift and iOS technical discussion, or a tool you have genuinely released. A post about your app that would still make sense if the app were a website has no technical substance and goes.
r/FlutterDevStrict
If you built in Flutter there is a package-shaped opening here that no general app sub offers.
The rule here: Whatever you post has to be Flutter-specific — a package, a tutorial, a technical breakdown of how you did something in Flutter. Generic app marketing with no Flutter content is removed.
r/reactnativeStrict
Same opening for React Native builds: the tooling and libraries you had to write to ship are content here even though the app itself is not.
The rule here: Libraries, tooling and technical writeups only. A launch post with a React Native badge on it still counts as generic app marketing and gets treated as such.

Rules change and moderators enforce their own reading of them. Check the sidebar before you post, every time, and see the full directory of 104 communities for the rest.

What this audience actually upvotes

Numbers taken straight off the store console. Daily installs, crash-free rate, D1 and D7 retention, what a keyword change did to impressions. Everyone reading has the same two dashboards open, so a real figure is instantly checkable and an invented one is instantly wrong — which is precisely why the real one carries weight.

The platform fight. App Review rejections and Play policy strikes are the shared trauma of this niche: what the reviewer actually wrote, how many rounds it took, the wording that finally passed. People who will never install your app will read two thousand words on getting past a Guideline 4.3 rejection, because most of them are one submission away from the same problem.

The thing you could not do without going native. Background location, notification delivery on Android OEM skins, the widget that refuses to refresh, battery drain you spent a fortnight chasing. These are problems every mobile developer has and no marketing page has ever described. Naming yours is the part that gets saved and linked back to.

The two ratios that decide whether you get removed

Enforcement on Reddit is account-level, not post-level. A moderator opens your profile after one post trips their attention and skims what fraction of the account is about its product. That is why a reasonable post attached to a promotional profile still goes.

9:1 — comments to posts. Reddit's self-promotion guidance implies about nine contributions that have nothing to do with your product for every one that does. It comes from Reddit's 2014 moderator clarification and its current small-business guide restates it as “be a user first”.

3:1 — value posts to promotional posts. Among your submissions, at most one in four should promote anything. Clearing 9:1 while every post you make is a plug still reads as a marketing account.

The mention-deletion test. Delete your product name from the post and reread it. If nothing of value is left, it was an advertisement with context attached and it will be removed. If it still teaches something, the mention is a footnote on a real contribution.

New accounts have a further problem: most large subreddits silently filter posts from accounts under a karma or age threshold, so the post looks live to you and is invisible to everyone else. Check yours with the karma and warmup calculator before you post at all.

What gets mobile apps removed

Dropping a TestFlight or Play Store link into a developer sub
r/androiddev and r/iOSProgramming both remove app-marketing posts with no technical content, and when the link is the post there is nothing else to judge. The link also decays: a TestFlight build expires, so within three months the thread has no content in it at all.
Instead: Take the engineering problem to the dev sub and recruit testers where recruitment is the format. r/betatests and r/AlphaandBetaUsers exist for it and tolerate a direct ask that r/iOSProgramming would delete.
Posting the same launch to r/androiddev and r/iOSProgramming because you shipped both platforms
Shipping cross-platform feels like two audiences, but it is one submission duplicated, which is the pattern spam filters are built to catch. Neither sub cares that your app exists; each cares about a platform problem the other post does not contain.
Instead: Write one platform-specific piece per sub — the Android one about Play Console or Compose, the iOS one about App Review or Swift — or put the cross-platform decision in r/mobiledev once and leave the other two alone.
Asking for downloads and ratings
Soliciting reviews off-platform breaks the review policies of both stores, and on Reddit it reads as vote brigading, which is one of the few things that escalates past a subreddit ban to a sitewide one. It also converts terribly: people who download out of obligation churn on day one and drag your retention down.
Instead: Ask for something a stranger can actually give you in five minutes. "Does the share sheet work on a Pixel 8, mine is the only device I have" gets answers, gives you a real bug report, and does not touch either store policy.
Bringing screenshots to r/AppBusiness
This is the one mobile community that will let you name your app, and a showcase wastes the permission. Its removals are for download links with no business detail, so a carousel of pretty screens is the exact shape of post it filters.
Instead: Bring the number you are least proud of. A post about the month installs dropped 40% after a store listing change, with the before and after, uses the permission properly and gets read by people who run apps.

A post that would survive

Written for r/AppBusiness. Adapt the specifics; keep the shape.

Rewrote our App Store subtitle and organic installs went 41/day to 137/day. Full 30-day numbers.

We had been flat at roughly 40 organic installs a day for five months. I assumed it was a reviews problem, because that is what every ASO thread says, and I spent about six weeks trying to get more of them. It was the subtitle. Ours was "Track your habits, beautifully." I liked that line. It contains one word anybody searches for. I replaced it with "Habit tracker with streaks and reminders", which I hated, because it reads like a filing cabinet. Thirty days later, changing nothing else: - Organic installs: 41/day to 137/day - Rank for "habit tracker": #47 to #9. "streak tracker": #6 from unranked - Product page conversion rate: 22.4% down to 19.8%, so it got worse - Paid conversions: up 71% The conversion drop confused me for a week. It is a traffic-mix effect. Before the change, nearly everyone who saw the page had arrived from a link and already wanted us, so of course they converted. Now most of them are browsing search results. A lower rate on three times the traffic. Three things I would tell someone stuck where I was: 1. The subtitle is indexed. The description is not, on iOS. I rewrote the description twice before I learned that, which was two wasted weekends. 2. Change one field and wait the full thirty days. I nearly swapped the icon in week two and would have had no way of knowing which change did what. 3. You do not have to lose the nice line. It went into the first screenshot caption, where nobody is searching and it still does its job. The uncomfortable part is that this was free and available on day one and I spent five months on everything except it. Happy to post the keyword list I tested against if that is useful — it took three rounds to get to terms that were not just the obvious ones.

Why it survives: It passes the mention-deletion test outright: there is no app name, no store link, and nothing to install, and it is still the most useful thing an app founder will read that day. It obeys the r/AppBusiness rule by being a case study with real figures rather than a showcase, and it reports the metric that moved the wrong way, which is the sentence an advertisement can never contain. The offer at the end gives anyone curious a reason to reply, and a link handed over in answer to a direct question is a different object from a link in the submission.

Frequently asked questions

Can I post my app on r/androiddev?: Only if the post is about Android engineering rather than about your app. r/androiddev carries a strict tolerance and removes app-marketing submissions with no technical content, so a launch or a Play Store link goes quickly. A writeup of a Compose problem you solved, a Play Console policy fight, or a library you open sourced is welcome, and your app can be the thing that produced the problem.
How do I get beta testers on Reddit?: Not in the developer subs. r/betatests and r/AlphaandBetaUsers exist specifically so people can be recruited, and a direct ask there is the expected format rather than a violation. Say what the app does, which platform and OS version you need, and what kind of feedback you are after — vague "try my app" posts get ignored even in communities that permit them.
Where can I promote a mobile app on Reddit?: r/AppBusiness is the strongest option tagged for mobile: it is built for ASO, monetisation and acquisition, so naming your own app inside a case study is on-topic there. r/mobiledev takes cross-platform build stories. The four framework and platform subs — r/androiddev, r/iOSProgramming, r/FlutterDev, r/reactnative — are technical-content-only, which means you can reach them but not with a launch.
Can I ask people on Reddit to leave my app a review?: No. Soliciting store reviews breaks both Apple and Google review policies, and on Reddit an organised ask for upvotes or downloads is treated as brigading, which can escalate past a single subreddit. Ask instead for something specific a stranger can do in five minutes, like reproducing a bug on a device you do not own.
Should I post my app to both r/androiddev and r/iOSProgramming?: Not the same post. Duplicating one submission across two overlapping subs is what rate-based spam filters look for, and neither community wants the launch anyway. Write the Android post about an Android problem and the iOS post about an iOS problem, days apart, or put the cross-platform decision in r/mobiledev once.

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Last reviewed: July 2026