Apple Debuts New AppStore.com Vanity URLs For Developers During Super Bowl | Hacker News Reader

Apple Debuts New AppStore.com Vanity URLs For Developers During Super Bowl

techcrunch.com

29 pointsiProject10 comments

The article is a little misleading in that it suggests a land-grab. The short links are auto-generated from app names/company names by pruning whitespace, copyright/trademark symbols and so on.

So if your app wasn't already called "Banking", you're not going to get appstore.com/banking.

Now that this exists, it feels to me like it obviously always should have been there. Hopefully this will improve app discoverability for developers, and help make up for deficiencies in App Store search.

I don't see how it will change anything. Search is broken at an algorithmic level, and switching from iTunes.com to AppStore.com really won't help. Much as I wish it would. Apple needs to either spend some of their cash reserve on some search engineers or play nice with google, if apple simply used good as the search engine behind the AppStore it would likely be a win for both companies. Apple sells more apps, google collects more data. By thinking small, apple are losing out every time someone tries to find an app, even using its name, and still the AppStore sometimes can't find it. I know there's some latency issues when something new comes out (who remembers trying to search "google maps" when it first launched a few months back only to find it had not yet reached your search instance), it beyond latency search in the AppStore needs a major overhaul

I'm curious how much their search and search interface are costing them. The App Store iOS application is atrocious; users are more likely to get frustrated and give up than find the application they were searching for.

I only see redirects to an itunes search.

  curl -I http://appstore.com/startrekapp
  HTTP/1.1 302 Found
  Server: somethingNice.
  Date: Tue Jun  1 12:48:03 PDT 1999 PDT
  Referer: http://appstore.com/
  Location:   http://search.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZContentLink.woa/wa/link?mt=8&path=apps%2fstartrekapp
  Content-type: text/html
  Content-length: 470

If you don't launch iTunes, it results in a bland/useless page in the browser. Lot more work to do before this could be considered a "vanity URL".

Update: If you add "www" to the URL, you get a 404.

I'm having a hard time believing that this is run by Apple. The appear to be the registrar in the domain records - and the technical note clearly indicates they control appstore.com

https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#qa/qa1633/_index.ht...

But it seems off-brand for the following reasons:

* requests to the main domain uses an HTML redirect instead of an HTTP redirect (as if they didn't have permissions to configure the webserver properly)

* the webserver name is hidden on normal requests (see above), but visible on 404 requests. The servers are "Apache/2.2.3 (PU_IAS)" and "Apache/2.2.15 (Oracle)"

* the message on a request to appstore.com is infantile (and unstyled) "Bye Bye You shouldn't be here."

Odd.

> the message on a request to appstore.com is infantile (and unstyled) "Bye Bye You shouldn't be here."

That's ridiculously unprofessional. Every other domain Apple owns redirects to apple.com/ if you go somewhere you shouldn't.

I wouldn't overestimate Apple when it comes to web technologies.

Everything they run — from iTunes Connect, developer.apple.com, to the App Store on iOS and Mac OS X, feels damn slow.

Seems 100% perfect to me. If I want a link to open my apps in iTunes, I can give them this one, and it was created automatically: http://appstore.com/titanbaseproductions

Interesting. I developed App Theme Store last summer at http://www.AppThemeStore.com. I currently have a couple of GitHub-related themes on it for purchase. I also have another "app" related domain since 2007. I'm sure I'm not the only one besides Amazon who believes the term "app store" is very generic.

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