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Comment by geuis | Hacker News Reader

How has anyone ever sold a product before? You market it.

The App Store isn't the sole place you should be marketing your app. If you have ever counted on just releasing your app into the store and have it somehow gain traction with no other effort, you've always been doomed to failure.

The App Store should be treated like a supermarket, after a fashion. You may get your product on the shelf, but simply relying on people walking by and seeing it is a terrible way to get people to try it. It always takes outside marketing to get people to look for your product or learn about it.

So you already have put a lot of work into making your application. Now go do some more legwork and get people talking about it.

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Heres the problem with marketing: Say, I am a really big software company and release an app for my biggest video hosting platform anyone knows: "youtube". Everyone knows the exact name of the application, goes to the store, enters "youtube". And guess whats first? Not "Youtube", but "Video Downloader Super Lite".

What use is good marketing if it is so hard to find things by _exact name_ on the store where you market it for? That basically means that any competitor can beat you by just including terms for your product in his description. The card interface makes this even worse, because with the old interface, "Youtube" would at least be on the front page, but now it is not.

Putting words into description won't make an app show up.

But aside from that - yeah, it sucks that some devs don't show for queries matching their exact names.

I stand corrected, "youtube" is not even in the description of Video Downloader, that was a lucky guess. Which makes the whole thing even more arcane, as it makes the search highly unintuitive.

I'm not sure if they changed anything, but Youtube has been the first search result for me since I upgraded my iPhone. It's not in the search results for the iPad since Google hasn't released Youtube for the iPad yet (or at least last time I searched).

I wonder if there's saved state in the app store that's modifying the search results.

It could also depend on which app store you are in, I am not from the US.

That's a good point. That is a problem with the App Store that needs to be changed asap. Accurate search is a mandatory must-have.

The problem with the app store as it stands today is that it generates almost no passive sales but also gives you virtually no insight into customer purchasing behavior. Compared to the incredibly detailed analytics you can get for a web app you're basically fumbling around in the dark.

"The App Store should be treated like a supermarket, after a fashion."

OK, but what if you wanted to find a new healthy cereal, but they first made you slowly look through each and every box of cereal that has ever existed until you find the new one you want to try?

The App Store USED to be like a Super Market, where all the cereal was facing out, and you could just glance at everything and pick what you wanted to learn more about.

Now it is not.

Having to spend more time and money marketing just to get my numbers to where they were is a disaster to me, as a developer. I'm not sure what you're getting at.

If you have any data on this, can you please link to any? From an iOS user POV, I always buy apps by browsing through the App Store. Starting to learn Chinese? - Download all free Chinese dictionaries and see what sticks. etc...

It's exactly like buying music - I have lots of friends who buy iOS apps, but no two of us have the same taste in apps, so everybody ends up browsing for themselves.

This is a great insight into how people actually search and use apps. It makes the case for free-to-download with in-app purchases. People won't think twice about downloading a free app to try it out, and if they like it, they'll spend the extra couple bucks or so to unlock its full feature set. My guess is that this is more profitable to everyone than Android's "erase in whatever time" to get a refund scheme.

I agree completely.

I'm trying to remember the last app I download(let alone purchased) by browsing through the top whatever in the app store. I think it was the flashlight app I got when I first bought my iPhone.

Now, I don't even bother with trying to browse apps. If I'm going to buy an app on either iTunes or Google Play, I'm searching for the specific one I want.

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