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Comment by jobvandervoort | Hacker News Reader

Looks great. The name got me thinking about App discovery however.

I search for 'Balls' and got many hits, most irrelevant and uninteresting.

Then I searched for the exact title of your app and got about 13k hits. None of the first 100 which was your app. I downloaded it through iTunes eventually.

That makes me wonder: how do you promote (iOS) app discovery? There are plenty of analytics startups for this, but is anyone trying to improve this process?

edit: Searched around for curated app websites / stores. There are some, but lack in depth and quality. I'm starting my own.

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yeah, the search kinda sucks. for app discovery there's xyo.net and there used to be chomp.com - the latter one was bought by Apple, but it might be worth for you to review their story.

now, on the developer's side there are also dedicated tools for app store seo - for finding good phrases and keywords to use for positioning, and for tracking your position. That's AppCodes.com . you might also want to check out some of my slides here: slideshare.net/kolinko . we've outlined the search basics over there.

Interesting to see so many people having problems finding the app. What's wrong with clicking the 'App Store' button and downloading it from iTunes? You can configure your iPhone to then automatically download it.

Serious question. I'm sure you all have some good reasons to not use iTunes and wanting to download it from your phone. Curious to hear what those reasons are.

Why would I want iTunes on my computer? I installed it only after losing and finding my phone to restore the phone; and it is annoying. It always pops up music whenever I plug my phone into charge. It also did some nonsense Outlook integration.

I never buy media through iTunes, I always use Amazon; so iTunes provides little, if any value on an ongoing basis.

Ah yes, if you don't use iTunes for anything else it wouldn't make sense installing it just for this.

If you dislike that popup iirc there is a service that starts up to facilitate this behavior, simply turn that to manual and you are good.

I use iTunes as my primary media collection, between iTunes Radio, Movies and TV I buy or rent, and even drop in videos from other sources so that I can AirPlay to my AppleTV. I don't sync my iPhone, but I use Automatic Downloading for music and videos, which is very convenient. This works because I can listen to those songs or watch those movies on my Mac or my iOS devices, so it's worthwhile to have it in my library. That is not the case with iOS apps, which take up space on my SSD and offer no functionality. So yeah, I usually resort to texting myself links to Apps to avoid downloading them from iTunes.

Fair enough. Never considered the disk space it occupies. Would be nice if the automatic downloading would work without downloading the app. (i.e. "Send to iPhone")

It works that way for videos. If I purchase a movie from iTunes it gives me the options to download it or not. The movie is available to stream (actually watch while it downloads, but the difference is indistinguishable) from other devices, so a similar option to avoid downloading the app into iTunes and get badges for updates would be nice.

You could purchase them in iTunes on your computer and then on your phone, go to App Store -> Updates -> Purchased and install from there.

Certainly, but my problem is that they then take up space on my computer and will put up a badge for app updates. I can guarantee that those apps will never be synced to a device.

Wouldn't you think typing the exact name of the app should show you that app first?

It seems pretty basic. When I type the exact name of a product on Amazon, I expect it to come up right away. And it does!

When the name of your product is a commonly used noun, good luck.

But it is literally the app name. Why isn't the rule to put the literal app name as the first result?

There's nothing wrong with that for people who choose to use it that way. But it kills discoverability (well, more accurately, there is no discoverability) for people who may hear about it without being given the direct link to this particular site or the page itself and attempt to search for it, only to find... they're not really sure what.

Valid point on worth-of-mouth. Since the app is relatively new, it might take a while for it to rank. (Not sure that's how the App Store works, but can imagine the more downloads/reviews the higher it will rank for its keywords)

Exactly. If I were the author I'd come up with a more unique name.

I run it on my phone, why wouldn't I install via my phone?

Yes, you are right. Somehow did not think about it in advance. I'm wondering how this could be solved.

"The name got me thinking about App discovery however."

This is exactly what came to my mind, as i added more terms to the search, to whittle down the results.

Interesting. Would love to see some innovation on this, beyond just SensorTower. Too many great apps get ignored.

Add me to your list (email in profile). :)

there are other options than sensortower - like AppCodes.com. while we're not as polished, we offer a totally different approach to the process.

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