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Comment by twhb | Hacker News Reader

Speaking of, Apple is to blame for the absolute worst case of discoverability I've ever encountered: getting the iOS App Store app to list all apps labeled "Essentials".

Dug around, couldn't find it. Googled it, found a few forum threads where everybody concluded it couldn't be done. Went into an Apple store, gave an employee a few minutes to figure it out, and he gave up.

And yet, it's possible.

Rather than just tell you, I'm going to leave this as a challenge. See how long it takes you to figure this out.

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Wow. That was about five minutes of hunting, and I actually seriously considered the possibility that your comment was a troll. That was impressively unexpected.

Could you share the solution? I couldn't figure it out. Searching for "essentials" was the closest I got.

Took me no more than 10 seconds. After noticing that the essential terms is translated into a query for apps TAGGED as essentials by Apple (Facebook, Google Mail etc), I just put the term in quotes("essentials" vs essentials in the search bar).

It's a convention followed for literal matches in tons of environments (including Google Search IIRC).

They'll never beat iTunes ("How in the ?#$# do shuffle and repeat actually work?!"), though.

Those devs are master-level trolls.

Searching for "essentials" seems to do the trick.

Same here. What am I missing?

Perhaps the App Store has been upgraded in the last 10 hours, but I too simply typed "essentials" into the search bar and it worked fine (on both iOS and Mac, as well as iTunes). Didn't even need to put it in quotes.

Perhaps actually doing the text search is the barrier you mean? Were you looking for an item labeled "Essentials" in the Quick Links section? I agree that would be preferable, but it's not like doing a search is the Riddle of the Sphinx.

For my part, my surprise comes from the fact that I have to use the free-text search UI to list matches for a tag, and whether it matches free text or a tag is completely opaque. It is hostile UI when I can filter on "Games" in the category list, and search for "Angry Birds" by free text, and yet tags live in a nebulous nowhere-space. If I wanted to find apps titled "<Language> Essentials", I'd be pretty annoyed to find them disappear behind an unexpected magic keyword-to-tag search.

In this case, there is no good place to put tag search because tags aren't first-class citizens.

Why on this blue-green earth would you want to ask a vendor for what they consider "essential". How is this useful to you? Why would you expect the vendor to provide this for you (except to further their own sales agenda)? This is a straw man that I implore you to burn.

Apple do a lot of editorial on the App Store.

Well, I remember having to search for "OK Google" in Google Maps to save the current view for offline viewing...

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