I'm sorry Bill but I am going to have to respectfully disagree. The App Store is broken and Apple is doing it wrong. The point of search is to find new interesting apps. With over 700,000 apps on the App Store, search is the only way most indie devs get sales. And with the new changes, even the best devs cannot rank high on search.
We do not think we are the center of the universe. However, we are an important park of Apple's ecosystem. We helped build the App Store to where it is today.
As of right now, it feels like Apple is kicking us to the curb, Just read some of the app dev forums around the web. A lot of us lost money over Apple's decisions last summer. And we will continue to lose money.
Please come back and comment when you have released you first app. If spending thousands of marketing dollars on my already popular apps did not decelerate my sales freefall, then most new apps on the App Store have very little chance at succeeding.
A new paid app will never rank high on search. That's the state of things right now. For some reason, Apple's new search algorithm prefers free apps over paid apps and older apps over newer apps.
Since the App Store search algorithm update in June, my apps have seen a 60% drop in sales. Before the search changes, two of my apps steadily made me around $40k a year for three years.
The drop in sales concerned me so I paid for external advertising and marketing. It did not help.
One of my apps was featured by Apple twice. Now when you search for it by its exact name, some free spam app shows up above my app.
I am expecting another huge sale decline starting this month thanks to the new iOS6 App Store.
I'm not sure how anyone can see this change as being rational. This change is as bad for customers as it is for developers.
As for me, I had a good run on the App Store. But the world is not ending. It's just time to look into other income streams.
We do not think we are the center of the universe. However, we are an important park of Apple's ecosystem. We helped build the App Store to where it is today.
As of right now, it feels like Apple is kicking us to the curb, Just read some of the app dev forums around the web. A lot of us lost money over Apple's decisions last summer. And we will continue to lose money.
Please come back and comment when you have released you first app. If spending thousands of marketing dollars on my already popular apps did not decelerate my sales freefall, then most new apps on the App Store have very little chance at succeeding.
A new paid app will never rank high on search. That's the state of things right now. For some reason, Apple's new search algorithm prefers free apps over paid apps and older apps over newer apps.