Apple looks to paid search to ‘improve’ discoverability on App Store

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App Store
Apple needs to help consumers find quality apps, and developers to sell them.
Photo: Parampreet Chanana/Pixabay

Apple seems to be looking to improve the way people find apps in the App Store. According to unnamed sources, paid search is one way Apple might both improve discoverability as well as make some money off the feature, like Google does on its own Google Play store.

Paid search would let developers pay Apple to more prominently display their apps in the App Store.

According to Bloomberg, this secret team of about 100 Apple employees includes several from the iAd team and headed by Apple VP Todd Teresi, who was in charge of iAd services previously.

The App Store continues to generate revenue for Apple, with a 30 percent cut from each sale on the App Store, part of the $20 billion Apple made last year, which it calls “services revenue.”

Finding ways to make it easier to find apps customers want will continue the trend, as the more apps people buy in a given App Store, the more likely they’ll stick around for future purchases.

Apple’s been looking to improve search and discoverability for a while now, with its acquisition of Chomp in 2012, and some executive shift this past December when Phil Schiller took over the App Store as part of his worldwide marketing responsibilities.

While the App Store’s search definitely needs some help with over 1.5 million apps to search through, we’re not sure making it a pay-to-win system will help anyone besides the app developers already on top. Indie developers already have a hard enough time making it through the noise of a crowded marketplace; if there’ll be an added “paid search” tax to pay, it might put quite a few smaller teams out of the running.

Here’s hoping that Apple will take more steps to improve discoverability on the App Store above and beyond accepting even more cash from development teams, and maybe finding new systems to allow consumers to find all the quality apps out there, whether they can afford to pay their way to the search system or not.

Source: Bloomberg

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