GigaOM » Chomp

Why App Store search (still) needs to be fixed

Erica Ogg — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 17:00:59 +0000

When news hit that Tweetie creator Loren Brichter’s new iOS game Letterpress was available for download I did what many of you probably did: picked up my iPhone and searched the App Store. But according to the App Store, Letterpress didn’t exist: repeated searches turned up zero results. So I went to Brichter’s company blog and found a direct App Store link to the game.

Given that Apple must approve every single app submitted to the App Store, this shouldn’t happen when new apps are released. Several colleagues had this same problem searching for Letterpress too. In general, it seems to take several hours for an app to surface in Apple’s App Store search function, even after press releases have been sent out about them and direct links assigned.

And unfortunately, this isn’t a new problem at all. I can also recall another specific instance of this: when Facebook’s new Camera app debuted. I tried to download it the moment I saw it was available. But again, the only way I could find it was through a direct link, this time sent to me by a colleague.

While it’s annoying to users, it’s even more frustrating for iOS developers. They’ve noticed several other problems with search, which they think were caused by the update to the App Store when iOS 6 was introduced in September. That release, which incorporated design and search changes from Apple’s acquisition of Chomp, was supposed to help users find more apps they’d like, as well as surface higher-quality apps.

But the sheer size of Apple’s App Store is working against this goal. With more than 700,000 apps available in the store, sifting through them is nearly impossible. And for developers, getting noticed or standing out is harder than ever. That’s why Apple has been experimenting with new ways for sorting apps: through more categories, topical lists and featured collections, and highlighting quality with Editor’s Choice selections. Third parties have been trying this from the outside too, with companies like Appsfire attempting to highlight the best-reviewed apps rather than the most-downloaded.

Developers have complained about App Store search nearly from the time Apple opened it in 2008. But despite attempts to fix these issues over the years and most recently with iOS 6, in many cases, the changes are just causing confusion. Here are some of the other issues I’ve heard about most from developers:

Inconsistent search results

The changes of an app being found in search seems to depend on how many downloads an app has. ”[S]earch results vary significantly between countries and the only correlation we’ve found was download numbers,” said Igor Zhadanov, CEO of Readdle, whose company has sold several iOS business apps since 2008. Sometimes if you have only a few downloads, you can’t be found easily in search. If you have a lot, then you will appear higher in the results. As an example, he said his company’s Scanner Pro app is displayed higher in more than 50 different search queries on the U.S. App Store compared to Canadian one — Scanner Pro sells better in the U.S. than Canada.

The problem with searching for new apps, shown by the Letterpress anecdote, hasn’t always been this bad. In previous iterations of the App Store, Zhadanov thinks Apple would “credit” brand new apps for about two weeks after release so they’d appear higher in listings and be visibile. The credit would make an app discoverable through search so they’d have a chance to build an audience. But since iOS 6 brought significant changes to the App Store, “it doesn’t seem to be the case” anymore, he said.

Chomp-ification

The acquisition of Chomp by Apple was intended to revamp App Store search and the way in which content was displayed. The new look of the mobile App Store, as it appears on iOS devices, is indeed Chomp-inspired, with search results displayed in full-screen panes representing each app rather than a traditional list. To scroll through search results or lists of apps, however, you need to swipe horizontally. It seems like a nice design choice because the images are so much larger, but it means just one search result appears at a time. So it’s much more work for users than simply scrolling vertically as before. And app developers, like Zhadanov, complain that people no longer bother scrolling through more than three to five apps now. Users I’ve talked to confirm this too. So, if you’re not in the top five results then it’s more likely a user won’t see your app. And that makes the next point even more upsetting for some smaller developers.

Off-target search results

The top result when searching for the app called Coaster

The App Store’s search function sometimes doesn’t deliver results in a way that seems logical to normal users. Here’s an example: When you search for “Coaster” in the mobile App Store, the first two results you get are Madcoaster and iRollercoaster, two rollercoaster games. Not until you’ve swiped horizontally to the third search result do you get the only app that’s actually called Coaster – the drink-ordering app I was looking for. Why does the exact search term, which is also the brand name for the app I’m searching for, not surface as the top result?

Coaster’s founder and CEO Inderpal Singh agrees the iOS 6 App Store upgrade is part of the problem. “With the new iOS 6 App Store, it’s almost impossible to find apps by brand — at least those without a million downloads,” Singh wrote in an email to me. The Coaster app is free and has been on the App Store since the spring, but doesn’t have downloads in the millions like the rollercoaster games. But it’s rated well by users and has a not-insignificant number of reviews and downloads. “Without any knowledge of Apple’s SEO methodology it’s tough to make your app noticed,” he said. “Coaster averages 5 Stars, has 85+ reviews and thousands of downloads. And is actually called Coaster. Not sure what more we can do to be #1.”

Need for transparency

It’s not Apple’s job to be the marketing arm of these small developer shops. But it is in Apple’s interest to cultivate a marketplace that works for both users and developers. Apple has worked hard to rid its App Store of incentivized install campaigns and other efforts to game App Store rankings. But if apps can’t be found via the search function, other methods of gaming the store will inevitably arise.

There are other legitimate ways of building a following of customers through outside means — advertising, media coverage, etc. And it’s in developers’ interest to figure out the best practices for dealing with Apple’s changes.

If users are not scrolling very far through results pages, one response is that developers need to take SEO even more seriously, said Carl Orthlieb, VP of engineering at Appcelerator, a cross-platform mobile development environment. His company surveys thousands of developers each quarter about their work on platforms like iOS.

“Like any change around SEO, you’ve gotta go and change your strategy,” he said. But he agrees that it’s tough for many developers to adapt when Apple institutes big changes. ”It would be great if Apple would provide transparency into how this works.”

Apple did not respond to a request for comment on this story.

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Apple’s getting its act together on app search, recommendation in iOS 6

Erica Ogg — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 15:23:03 +0000

At WWDC in June, Apple SVP of iOS Software Scott Forstall briefly mentioned that the App Store would be getting an update in iOS 6, due this fall. On Friday, 9to5Mac posted screenshots from the updated iOS App Store that just became available to developers, and they bring good news: the changes show the results of Apple’s acquisition of app discovery company Chomp earlier this year, and far more emphasis on app recommendations and discovery.

Forstall provided no details at the developer conference and didn’t dwell on the topic, but the lack of emphasis on his part doesn’t accurately reflect how important those changes are going to be for both developers and users.

In the below screenshot grabbed from a developer video of the changes, you can see what a search results page looks like in the new iOS App Store. Instead of the current list-like results page showing just the app name and icon, you will get a series of cards that display much more information about apps your search has turned up: screenshots of the app, name, rating, price. It’s more similar to the results you get when searching the App Store in iTunes on Mac OS X, but designed for touchscreens, with those big, easily tappable buttons. (This, along with some behind-the-scenes search algorithm stuff, is what Chomp brought with it to Apple.)

Screenshot from iPodUplink video

Another really big change is the emphasis Apple is going to place on the Genius function of the App Store. The button has been moved to the middle and is likely going to be central to how users interact with the store from now on. Rather than having it hidden away as one option, Apple is going to take the data it already has about what apps you like based on what you’ve downloaded and use that to recommend other apps.

This has been the App Store’s biggest weakness. Apple has the largest mobile App Store around, and it has added search features, categories and even some human curation, but a huge challenge has remained: surfacing quality apps that are tailored to specific users. Right now, the emphasis in the App Store is on the most-downloaded apps, lists which have been dominated by larger, better known developers, and in the past have been easy to game.

Apple using the wealth of data it has is great for users and for developers who struggle to get their apps recognized or noticed in an App Store of 650,000 apps. However, the new focus on Genius recommendations probably will not be received as good news for the bevy of app discovery apps and services that have cropped up over the last few years designed specifically to solve this problem.

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Xyologic takes funding as latest to improve mobile app discovery

David Meyer — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 14:08:13 +0000

Analytics startup Adeven suggested earlier this week that two-thirds of App Store was pretty much invisible to most users, leaving the apps unranked and hardly downloaded.

The company said, somewhat controversially, that Apple’s app search was lacking, leaving users largely dependent on Top 25 lists that tend to reflect the size of the developer’s marketing budget more than they do relevance to the users’ needs.

It’s not the first time someone has highlighted a problem here. Indeed, there are a few companies trying to target a perceived need for app discovery. Appsfire and Quixey spring to mind, as – of course – does Chomp, which Apple bought earlier this year.

But another service that has been gearing up for around two years is Berlin-based Xyologic, whose Xyo service went into closed beta on Thursday (you can request an invite here).

Xyologic’s big selling point is the way its technology classifies apps into relatively specific genres – a strategy that it says makes it possible to understand even vaguely-expressed search queries. In a recent blog post, the firm said its work so far has shown:

only five percent of app search queries are for specific usage functions.
a similar amount are for specific app names.
the vast majority are category searches.

So, using its proprietary ‘natural app category’ tech, the company has defined more than 700 app genres and more than 100 game genres. It also claims to “put some of the best and often undiscovered apps on top of the search result rankings”, and says it can make it easier for users to evaluate the quality of an app.

Right now, the Xyo beta covers Android, although iOS is coming soon. Xyologic also announced a funding round (amount undisclosed), from investors including Signia Venture Partners, Gameforge founder Klaas Kersting and Soundcloud co-founder Eric Wahlforss. Xyologic CEO Matthäus Krzykowski told me:

“This is the first app search that aims at the mainstream user. Our approach is unique in this sense that, in the last two years, we have gathered information on how users search for apps, what queries they type, how they behave.”

So how bad is the app discovery problem, really? According to Krzykowski, 0.1 percent of apps get 50 percent of the downloads.

“The situation is pretty similar on all platforms, albeit slightly better on iOS,” he added.

Sure, Krzykowski has a vested interest in pointing this out. But, at the same time, this kind of information is what’s kept the company afloat during its initial, pre-launch two years of operations. Until this new investment round, Xyologic has bootstrapped and supported itself by selling data and reports.

“We also tested older versions of our app search in partnerships with third parties where we split up the advertising revenue. We used this money to fund our innovation in app search,” Krzykowski noted, adding that, in terms of future revenues, “you will see innovative approaches to app marketing”.

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What iPhone with NFC & Passbook means for airlines, plus 4 other Apple stories to read today

Erica Ogg — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 17:41:23 +0000

With so many people writing about Apple, finding the best stories and reports isn’t easy. Here’s our daily pick of stories about the company from around the Web that you shouldn’t miss:

AppleInsider recounts how at a recent industry conference the CTO for SITA, a company that does IT for airlines, said he believes the iPhone — with Passbook and NFC — will be a catalyst for mobile tickets for their industry. “You need to get ready, this is coming,” he told them.
Apple has chosen to use Yelp’s API for location check-ins within its upcoming Maps product, Bloomberg notes, giving it a potential advantage over rival check-in service Foursquare.
We’ve been wondering about this: Is Chomp’s app search and discovery starting to be integrated into Apple’s App Store search? TechCrunch heard from a few developers who think the answer is “yes.”
We know Apple heavily influenced Microsoft’s foray into physical stores. But what about Disney and Tesla? Forbes explains Steve Jobs’ vision of retail and how it has directly affected all three brands.
9 to 5 Mac notes that Apple has quietly changed the language used to describe the Mac’s virus susceptibility.

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When are we going to see what Apple is doing with Chomp?

Erica Ogg — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 13:59:54 +0000

The mobile App Store app’s design was getting a little long in the tooth, so it’s good to see that in the developer preview of iOS 6 that Apple has done some major polishing.

Instead of the list view of featured apps, for instance, the new app stacks app categories and allows horizontal scrolling. It also replaces the darker, two-tone gray theme with a lighter gray, which gives it a much fresher look. In the picture above you might notice that the new App Store (right) bears a somewhat passing resemblance to app discovery service Appsfire‘s design of its app, though to be fair, Apple’s new app now also looks and feels a whole lot more like the desktop version of the App Store.

The bigger question is, besides design and usability features, what has Apple done to improve search and discovery? Apple scooped up mobile app discovery service Chomp in February, which gave many app shoppers hope Apple would have a more useful take on app discovery. With more than 650,000 apps available for download, sifting through those to find what you want can be a chore. This difficulty has in turn given rise to a category of services designed to mitigate this problem (subscription required), and Chomp was one of them.

One new thing seems to be a better presentation of related apps that pops up when you’re looking at a particular app, as you can see to the right. It seems more Amazon-like in recommending other apps that the same people bought. And Facebook’s integration with the App Store is also a way of serving up recommendations from friends: when a friend “likes” an app in the App Store, that’ll show up in your Facebook feed.

But is that it? Chomp helps in searching for apps by scouring app reviews and rankings, as well as blog and social media mentions to find the best of a type of app you’ve searched for, and it doesn’t appear that any of that is integrated into the new App Store app. The final version of iOS 6 doesn’t arrive until the fall, so let’s hope there’s more coming.

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New Apple app discovery tools welcome, but aren’t enough

Erica Ogg — Fri, 25 May 2012 13:33:26 +0000

The Verge has picked up on some small but potentially significant tweaks to the iOS and Mac app stores: a new Editor’s Choice feature and the first App of the Week to be completely discounted to free.

Editor’s Choice is exactly what it sounds like, a pick of the best apps from the App Store team intended to highlight something they don’t want to get lost in the shuffle of the 600,000 apps for sale in the iOS App Store and the 10,000 in the Mac App Store. The debut choice for iOS apps is Facebook Camera, a high-profile new camera app for iPhone, and the game Extreme Skater. For Mac Apps, Cobook and Deus Ex Human Revolution were the picks.

The first Editor’s Choice picks in the Mac App Store

Making the App of the Week free for the first time — it was for Cut the Rope: Experiments — is, as many will note, something out of Amazon’s playbook. A free app each day is one way Amazon helps people discover new apps in its Android Appstore. Who knows if Apple will ever do it again. It could have been merely an experiment — but it does show Apple is keen to try new things to improve app discovery.

It’s slightly ironic to me that Facebook Camera was one of the first choices for this new feature, particularly because when I tried to search for it in the App Store on my iPhone yesterday after news of its availability hit, the store returned the wrong results. Instead of Facebook Camera, it kept giving me Camera Awesome, iVideo Camera and iUploader for Facebook. What does it say about App Store search if the hottest new item can’t even be found by people trying to search directly for it? There are more drastic measures that need to be taken than just surfacing a few cool apps.

It’s obviously not a secret to App Store shoppers — or app creators for that matter — that sifting through hundreds of thousands of apps is tough. That’s why Apple has continued to introduce categorization features meant to more easily surface quality apps across different genres. There’s already the carousel of picks up top, the “New and Noteworthy” and “What’s Hot” sections, in addition to the top paid and free app charts, in addition to curated lists like Games, Education, and a variety of starter kits.

But it’s also not a secret to Apple. It’s presumably what was behind its purchase of app discovery tool Chomp back in February, believed to be for $50 million.

Not that any of these challenges have prevented Apple and its developers from making money on them. Apple has seen more than 25 billion downloads from the iOS store alone since 2008. But making that process easier is always welcome.

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Apple kills Chomp for Android

Om Malik — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 13:50:36 +0000

Apple acquired app discovery service Chomp earlier this year, betting that it would help make app discovery easier and better on its iTunes Appstore. The casualty of that acquisition is the Chomp for Android app which seems to have been discontinued. It is hard to figure out what is going to happen to Chomp’s deal with Verizon. Anyway, the upside of Chomp for Android being put out to pasture is that it means less competition for rival app discovery platforms such as AppsFire and others, who can work with carriers for better app discovery on their Android stores.

Chomp.com before the acqusition:

Chomp.com today:

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Facebook: Social trumps searching for mobile apps

Tom Krazit — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 19:33:16 +0000

It’s easier than ever to create a mobile app business from scratch, but it gets harder and harder every month to stand out from the crowd. Hours after Apple’s plans for improving app discovery emerged, Facebook reminded mobile developers that it offers an awfully big platform and discovery engine for their work.

The company published a blog post Friday morning outlining how it believes the Facebook can help developers concerned about the discoverability problem. Getting noticed in places like Apple’s App Store, Google’s Android Market, or the other big third-party Android app stores is tricky and often fleeting; sometimes the result of a fluke appearance on a “best of” list.

“On many of today’s mobile platforms, distribution is often a function of ranking and position in curated app stores,” wrote Facebook’s James Pierce, head of mobile developer relations. “While this benefits established apps and (those) that are editorially featured, for the majority of developers, getting an app discovered can present a real challenge.”

Facebook’s argument is that if app developers use Facebook to have users log into their apps, new users will discover that app naturally as friends share activity within the app on their News Feed. It cited examples such as Foodspotting’s iOS app and Diamond Dash, an iOS game that enjoyed a traffic increase “by a factor of 3″ after it started using Facebook’s Single Sign On technology. But Facebook would obviously like developers to think of Facebook itself as an app development platform, highlighting the Washington Post’s Social Reader Facebook app. (Donald Graham, CEO of The Washington Post Company, is a Facebook director and investor.)

Getting into bed with Facebook isn’t necessarily a recipe for instant success: of the 425 million people who accessed Facebook through a mobile device in a month, just 60 million, or 14 percent, go on to visit another app. Still, Facebook mobile usage is growing, and Facebook’s argument that people enjoy discovering new products, information, and perhaps apps from their friends is at the heart of what could be a historic initial public offering.

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Apple looks to Chomp to improve App Store discovery

Ryan Kim — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 14:19:46 +0000

With more than 550,000 apps, finding the right app in Apple’s App Store can be a challenge for some. Though the App Store is still ahead of rival Android Market in discovery features, Apple clearly sees a need to ramp up and improve the way it helps consumers pick through its growing collection of apps. That’s what’s behind the acquisition Thursday of Chomp, an app discovery engine that helps users search for apps on iPhone, iPad and Android devices.

The acquisition, first reported by TechCrunch and confirmed by Apple, gives Apple a pretty robust tool to improve its App Store. Chomp lets users find apps by searching without knowing the name of a particular app. Users can search by what an app does and then find relevant results, which start appearing right as a user begins typing. Chomp looks at all the data associated with an app to bring up results and also gathers information from blogs, social networking sites and other app stores to find what’s trending. The company also launched “Chomp Search Ads” last fall, a sort of AdWords program allowing developers to bid on certain keywords in app searches.

Verizon actually rebuilt its VCast App Store in September using Chomp to power discovery, even though it only had a few thousand apps in its store. It showed that even a big company like Verizon saw value in applying more smarts to app discovery, something the Android Market has been criticized for not improving upon. Chomp will reportedly continue to power VCast App Store for now, but that arrangement will eventually end as it gets integrated into the App Store experience, TechCrunch said.

The price of the deal was not announced though Bloomberg said it was worth $50 million. This is Apple’s second acquisition this year following its purchase of Anobit, an Israeli company that makes digital signal processing tech to improve the performance of NAND flash. It’s unclear if Apple under Tim Cook is going to be more acquisitive but Apple historically has not been a big buyer of companies like Google, Oracle and others. But with about $100 billion in cash and investments, it makes sense to look at absorbing more companies, as long as it can find a team that fits with its culture.

The purchase of Chomp, which has raised about $2.5 million, comes as Apple is closing in on 25 billion app downloads. It continues to be well ahead of Android Market but Google’s app store has been working to close the distance in the number of apps and downloads. I think this shows that Apple knows that it needs to continue to provide the best app store experience, which has been pretty good but needs to get better.

Even though it’s the only place to buy iOS apps, there are other services like AppsFire, Zwapp, Quixey and others that are showing how to make app discovery even smarter. The App Store is a big advantage for Apple and one that helps it compete well with Android and keep consumers and developers dedicated to iOS. If it can improve upon how many apps users download and discover, it can mean more utility for consumers and a bigger payout to developers, who have already gotten $4 billion in payouts from the App Store.

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The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 07:01:22 +0000

As our demand for data increases, so too do the number of mobile devices and services. Add to that the infrastructure needed to support such connectivity, and a wide, complex picture of the mobile industry emerges. This report examines the various sectors of the mobile landscape and what the future holds for each. Hardware, cloud services, mobile search, advertising, location-based services and the growing ubiquity of the Internet of Things will all play an important role in the concept of mobility as it shifts and evolves over the next several years. With the help of more than a dozen contributors, GigaOM Pro presents a comprehensive analysis of the companies and trends that will lead us into the next era of mobile.

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