Can Length Limit for App Titles Benefit Consumers?

The App Store introduced a title-length limit for mobile apps in 2016, and similar policies were later adopted across the industry. This issue drew considerable attention from industry practitioners in the 2010s. Using both empirical and theoretical approaches, this paper examines the effectiveness of this policy and its welfare implications. Title length became an issue because some sellers assemble meaningful keywords in the app title to convey information to consumers, while others combine irrelevant yet popular keywords in an attempt to increase their app’s downloads. We hypothesize that when titles are short, title length is positively associated with an app’s performance because both honest and opportunistic sellers coexist in the market. However, due to the presence of opportunistic sellers, once titles become too long, this positive relationship disappears. We examine this hypothesis using a random sample of 1998 apps from the App Store in 2015. Our results show that for apps with titles longer than 30 characters, title length remains positively associated with app performance. However, for titles exceeding 50 characters, we do not have sufficient evidence to conclude that further increases in length continue to generate additional downloads. To interpret our empirical findings, we construct communication games between an app seller and a consumer, in which the equilibrium is characterized by a threshold. Based on our model and empirical observations, the 30-character limit might hurt consumers.