IOS6 and iPhone 5 App Store Discoverability: What changed?

Here's something anecdotal: my wife updated to iOS6, and immediately complained that she couldn't stand the new App Store search result style.

Cut to yesterday, and she was looking for a calendar app. She mentioned that she'd decided she preferred the new style after all, because seeing the screenshots directly in the search results was just so incredibly better for what she was doing.

So it might be one of those changes that grows on you.

Developers are already optimizing for keyword search. The article also assumes users aren't already performing long tail searches. The bigger problem is that the search algorithm is broken and favors apps which have more raw downloads.

This means that free or freemium apps rank higher (even on long tail search results). This isn't good for quality apps which are paid purchases but have fewer downloads compared to a mediocre quality but free app.

Keywords and the app title can only be changed when you update an up. So if you 'rinse & repeat' like the slides say, you risk making your search rankings worse.

It also says to put in keywords into the app description. It's fairly well known that the app description does not effect App Store search results.

I'm as rabid an Apple fan as the next guy, but I really have no idea what they were thinking when they decided to revamp the App Store search results page. I've been thinking about it since I updated to iOS6 and haven't been able to come up with any benefits to this layout. They show a screenshot of the app, but I think most people, including myself, search for apps either by name or icon, not by screenshot - and that's what's taking up most of the space. All the other information - icon, name, author, rating, install button - could have been laid out in the conventional list-like format, would have saved space, shown more results, and forced the user to scroll less. And let's talk about the scrolling... Horizontal scrolling is a huge pain. People hate it on the web, and I imagine they hate it on mobile as much as I do. Scrolling vertically just makes sense especially when you're going through lists.

The only reason I can think of behind Apple's decision is that they're trying to cater to big companies and studios, so that when you search American Airlines, you can be sure that that first result, and the only result shown, is the official app. That's great for big companies with a recognizable name and brand, but terrible for people trying to compete in the games/social/etc spaces, where the apps are often named "motorcycle racer X" and are competing against 20 other similar ones.

Edit: Much of these criticisms apply to the categorical app pages as well.

This for the end users who just own a phone will provide a bias as a user will only scroll so far, for those who can use a web browser then things become more palatable.

If anything a rise in alternative market search applications will rise perhaps. I do see a increase in mobile application review sites and with that opening up a whole new bias and targeted adverts.

What independant review sites do you trust today as nothing jumps to my mind, though I'm sure somebody has a favorite. For me the I have found alot of applications from not just the reviews but following the comments looking at the best as well as the worst rated ones and from that I get a feel for if I want to try the application out in the first place.

The ability to directly link a application to its respective markets and enable selection and install that way is realy the saviour from this change being diabolical. Reason being I see no sane reason for Apple to limit user choice and indeed purchase, but any bias - even at the expense of users attention span to swipe multiple times is one which serves no sane sence to anybody except with extreamly poor eyesight.

In slide 4 they go for a completely different app to the one in slide 3 (cPro+) which was accessible within 4 clicks as the top paid app under that category.

I agree that the discoverability is bad with the new single slide search, but the slides are a bit misleading in this case.

Because the App Store is ruled by small studios this will have a massive long term effect on the app store itself and its key competitive advantage over android, which is of course it's ability to provide "a (funtional) app for everything". If small studios will have trouble getting discovered they will have trouble in generating revenue and when that happens many other small studios, that don't have enough money for ads at launch, will lose interest in the marketplace as well.