App Store Search Rant - not sure what to do...

We have an app that has been in the store for many years and has enjoyed decent success. At one time, it was consistently in the top 10 of all educational apps.


We have continued to update the app, and it had a major overhaul about 2 years ago, and has gotten periodic updates every six months since. It gets very good ratings, and we continue to get large institutional downloads of 5,000 and 10,000 downloads. It's a genuinely good app, doesn't crash, and has unique features.


However, if you search for it on the app store, using a common term for its category (which is also in our keywords), it is placed in the index, somewhere around 100th. Behind all kinds of tangentially related apps and bundles.


How can this be good for the end user? If we do the exact same keyword search on desktop iTunes, it shows up 8th, which is what I would expect at this point.


I'm trying to figure out what to do. I certainly don't want to continue to invest in this app if it stays in the Search cellar. I'm considering just creating a new, similar app and seeing how that does instead.

I doubt creating a new app would improve the situation any. App Store search results are terrible. They have been for years. You could file a bug on the difference between desktop and device results. But really the only thing we can do as developers is not rely solely on the App Store for our marketing. We have to get the word out by word of mouth and our own marketing efforts.

Your not wrong, they used to show 400 apps in a search, now it shows around 100.


Dont know when teh cut happend, but the search function is now useless.

App Store Search Rant - not sure what to do...
 
 
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