My app hit #1 in its category, and it changed almost nothing

A while back I posted here that my smallest app, TrimrPix, had reached number one in Photo and Video on the Danish App Store. That felt great for about a day.

Here is the honest follow-up. The spike was brief and local, and it never turned into steady installs. Months on, the app has a small handful of lifetime downloads, most of them from people already near me, and shipping a new release on its own brought in zero new users. The product works well. Almost nobody finds it.

I just shipped 1.6.0, with live progress for big batches and faster previews. That was the easy part. What I am actually short on is distribution. Ranking high for a moment taught me that a chart position is not the same as being discoverable, at least not this far down the long tail.

So I am trying to learn the boring part properly instead of shipping more features. For those of you selling small paid Mac or iOS utilities, what actually brought you steady downloads over time? I am curious which channels were worth the effort and which turned out to be noise.