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Comment by sillyquiet | Hacker News Reader

The App Store is great, but the App Store interface sucks. It was bad enough even when there were only a couple thousand apps in the store, but 10 years and hundreds of thousands of apps later and discoverability is abysmal. Unless you are a big player can advertise your app otherwise, having an app 'hit' is about a scientific a process as making viral videos.

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I feel like good search is to Apple as good taste is to Microsoft. It's like it's against their DNA or something.

With the huge exception of Spotlight on Mac OS

Spotlight is absolutely horrendous?

I think it works slightly better than search in Windows 10, and importantly, Apple was first to the punch to bundle an indexing search engine into the OS. Microsoft followed with Windows Vista.

It's no different than any other type of marketplace whether it be for music, books, video, etc.

I strongly disagree. Finding a product on Amazon is significantly easier than finding something in the App Store. Sometimes even if you know the exact name of the app you literally cannot access it unless you have the URL. Their search is awful and forget browsing with the amount of content.

Can confirm this experience

Well, unless you're talking about the Kindle Fire App Store- which is magnitudes worse than the App Store.

The Play Store (other than the horrific naming) strikes a decent balance, but isn't particularly great either.

Don't know why app stores seem to be so challenging for all the players in the space.

Probably because for apps there isn't a rich interconnected web of linked content to tell an algorithm what it needs to know in order to provide a good search experience. Google kinda got lucky in the sense that the discussion about the web happens on the web.

To stretch this a bit, I feel like "search" in general is a weak spot for Apple. For example, I think the search in Apple Mail and searching my Macbook are both very bad, especially the one for Apple Mail.

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