11–20 of 126 posts
However, if you are building an app for Picasa, it better have "Picasa" in its name. The results are probably sorted by relevance (whatever that might be) and not only by ratings.
It's unlikely that Apple will fix this any time soon. I can't think of a single time when Apple gave one of their pre-loaded apps an overhaul except when releasing the next major version of iOS.
However, I will look at apps one at a time and decide which one is best. On iOS 5 this meant clicking on each list item one by one, waiting (forever) for the app page to load, and eventually picking one. Allowing me to browse through apps one at a time and see all the information I need without ever leaving the screen seems like it would encourage discovery, not hurt it. I can even download the app right from the search screen AND I don't get thrown out of the App Store when I start the download so I can just download all the apps I want to try at once. This seems like a huge win to me.
Do other people browse the App Store differently?
The same is true of iBooks.
Apple has crappy search technology and even crappier implementations.
This will raise the bar for developers. It'll force them to do better app store SEO and it'll force the, to pay attention to design. Ugly apps aren't always necessarily bad but more ugly apps are bad than ugly apps that are good. This isn't Android. On iOS, users tend to judge an app by its icon and screenshots and they use pretty apps more than they open ugly ones. I didn't make the rules, I just play by them. Developers should be welcoming competition and with so many crap apps out there today it's probably better for good app developers to work on getting their rankings higher while the crap app makers languish at the end of the results.
While its bad for developers it's great for buyers. Guess what? There are far more buyers than developers on the app store. You may argue that if developers leave then iOS will die. Not so. Again, iOS users are a different animal. They can live with just a few big name apps from the major players. Android users tend to like lots of apps from indie devs and iOS users do too but if push came to shove they'd just keep their Angry Birds, Skype, Facebook, Twitter, and Yelp and go on with their day. Screenshots are very important in the buying process and putting them front and center like this.
As developers we tend to think we're the center of the universe. We place far too much importance on our role than is deserved. Witness the outrage over Twitter's API. While developers were screaming about revolt the users barely noticed and kept tweeting away. Meanwhile Twitter pretty much gave us the finger because they know we'll be back because they have the users. Developers are like parents in a way. We raise a platform then the platform rebels. We threaten to cut them off but by that point the platform is all grown up and doesn't need our help anymore. iOS won't be hurt by developers leaving. If developers leave over not being found in search results then by definition they're leaving because no one's using the app. Who's going to miss an app that never gets used?
The number one search for "picasa" should be Picasa.
Of course, this is negative for publishers who are trying to leverage the search field with "like names" and, for those publishers who get business from people searching for random apps in a particular category.
But, in general, this is good for people like me - who heard about a great new app by name on a podcast, and just want to try it out - having the extra data around the screenshot is useful.