The honest answer is that these are not competitors, and framing them as a single either/or decision is what leads solo developers to spend money badly. They behave completely differently, and that difference matters more than any ratio someone will give you.
The structural difference
Paid acquisition buys attention you stop owning the moment you stop paying. Turn off the spend and installs return to baseline that week. Store optimisation compounds instead: a listing that ranks well keeps earning installs while you sleep, and keeps earning them next month.
That does not make paid acquisition bad. It makes it a different instrument. It buys speed and certainty; organic ranking buys durability.
Why organic usually comes first for one person
A solo developer has a constraint a funded team does not: your time and money are the same resource. Paid campaigns need continuous management, creative iteration and a budget large enough to gather statistically meaningful data. Under-funded campaigns produce noise, and reading noise as signal is how people conclude “ads don't work for my app” on evidence that could not have supported that conclusion either way.
Store optimisation has a much lower floor. The work is mostly one-off, the cost is your attention rather than a daily spend, and the result does not evaporate when you stop.
The case for paying earlier than that
There are real exceptions:
- You need data faster than organic can give it. Paid traffic is a way to buy a sample and learn whether your product page converts at all.
- You have a genuine deadline. A launch window or a seasonal peak does not wait for a ranking to climb.
- Your economics are proven. If you know what a user is worth over their lifetime and it exceeds what one costs to acquire, spending is arithmetic rather than a bet.
The thing both depend on
Your product page converts or it does not, and that rate governs the return on every install from either channel. Improving it is the only work that makes paid and organic better at the same time, which is why it is usually the highest-leverage thing on the list.
If you want one sequence: get the listing converting, take the organic positions you can reach, and only then spend money to accelerate something you have already proved works.