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Comment by helaoban | Hacker News Reader

> While Apple didn’t challenge the idea that Files was unfairly ranked over Dropbox, the company says the reality was a simple mistake: the Files app had a Dropbox integration, so Apple put “Dropbox” into the app’s metadata, and it was automatically ranked higher for “Dropbox” searches as a result.

This seems to be the key argument, I've not seen this addressed anywhere. The Files app doesn't compete with Dropbox, if anything it promotes an interface to Dropbox.

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Even so, why would their ranking favor a metadata match (whose app name doesn't match) over an exact app name match?

In IT, there are edge cases, QA misses, design mistakes and ofc the almighty programming bug.

Pick.

Possibly. Could be negligence if they're not already testing for such cases.

Or could be they boosted their own app intentionally.

I’m curious, what hypothetical scenario do you imagine where Apple got any real world benefit from having files appear above Dropbox when searching for “dropbox”?

Setting aside whether Files is a competitor (which I’m honestly not sure it is) I would imagine that at least 99% of the time, a person searching for a specific product by name isn’t in a mind space to be conquered by a competitor.

You asked for a hypothetical scenario so I'll give you one. User starts using Files instead of Dropbox to view their file that are stored in the cloud on Dropbox.

Apple wants to drive up iCloud usage so they add a one time prompt into their Files app asking if users want to upgrade their iCloud storage. It's not a massive deal on it's own but this would take users away from Dropbox and Dropbox has no recourse to convince the user otherwise because users are accessing Dropbox through Files (since that's the #1 ranked app they downloaded instead of Dropbox).

Because you're thinking of Dropbox as the company and product rather than just a word, if someone searches "games" they should be shown results for games instead of an app or apps literally named "games", so it's important to rank metadata highly even if above actual app names.

But Dropbox is also a trademarked name. And 'games' is a more general term, such as for a whole category.

Iirc Apple was using Drop Box before Dropbox existed, as a place for other users on the network to drop files onto your hard drive.

That sounds like a significantly different meaning to me. If they were still using that branding in a significant way, and treating an app that does that as a match, that would be more understandable. But that's not what the files app is.

I’m not trying to defend Apple, just adding context around the discussion of “Dropbox” as trademarked term vs in general usage, even by Apple.

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