What Happens After Apple Features

App Store

A few days later, Apple named von Ahn's app Duolingo as the best iPhone app of 2013. Duolingo, a free app for learning languages, launched on iOS in late 2012 and had been featured in various sections of the App Store before, but little compares to being called out as the top app of the year. Duolingo's total app downloads across platforms spiked from an average of about 80,000 per day before the announcement to "hundreds of thousands" during the days after, von Ahn told Mashable.
Some of this increase, von Ahn believes, may have happened either way as people make New Year's resolutions to learn new languages and also rush to download apps at the end of the year. Still, he estimates that this Apple mention likely brought in "half a million" new users since Dec. 

Thanks to this year-end surge in downloads, von Ahn said Duolingo recently hit 20 million registered users, up from 15 million in late November.

"We are usually not really aware what's going to happen. They just take whatever they want," von Ahn said of his previous experiences with Apple featuring Duolingo. "So we knew this one was going to be a little more prominent."

Duolingo's experience is similar to that of other startups we spoke with. Each Thursday afternoon, a small editorial team at Apple selects apps to highlight for the following week in the App Store. Like the rest of Apple, this team operates secretively and rarely reaches out to notify the developers, except to occasionally ask for artwork or, for very high-profile selections like the end-of-year picks, to give a heads up so the companies can make sure they're ready for a significant increase in activity.

With more than one million apps in Apple's App Store, any extra spotlight from Apple is welcome, but some feature slots are much more effective than others. // Mashable