I am the developer of Pinland, a macOS app (App ID 6793889737; Bundle ID com.zeenzhao.pinland).
For approximately one month, customers searching the accurate brand name pinland in the US, Australian and UK Mac App Store website results have been unable to find the app. The product record is accessible, and changing only the query by adding literal double quotes makes the same app appear.
This is urgent: I am currently running promotional activities for Pinland. Users who follow the promotion and search the advertised app name cannot find it. This is causing lost users, wasted promotional effort and financial loss. I urgently need the responsible team to investigate and resolve this issue as soon as possible.
Latest reproduction: 2026-10-14 23:23 China Standard Time (UTC+08:00).
-
US: pinland does not return Pinland in the displayed results; "pinland" with literal double quotes returns it first.
-
Australia: pinland does not return Pinland; "pinland" returns it fourth.
-
UK: pinland does not return Pinland; "pinland" returns it fourth.
Reproduce by opening each pair below and comparing the results for App ID 6793889737. The storefront stays the same; only the literal quotes change.
US:
https://apps.apple.com/us/mac/search?term=pinland
https://apps.apple.com/us/mac/search?term=%22pinland%22
Australia:
https://apps.apple.com/au/mac/search?term=pinland
https://apps.apple.com/au/mac/search?term=%22pinland%22
UK:
https://apps.apple.com/gb/mac/search?term=pinland
https://apps.apple.com/gb/mac/search?term=%22pinland%22
Product page:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pinland/id6793889737
Supplemental evidence from the earlier checks on October 14: Apple's public iTunes Search API with entity=macSoftware returned Pinland first in all three storefronts, while the consumer search behaved differently. In the native Mac App Store tested then, Pinland showed no Mac result while Pinland! returned it. I understand that the public API and consumer search are different surfaces; this evidence is included to help isolate the issue.
Previous Developer Support cases: 102995455467 (Chinese) and 102995458323 (English). I have not yet received a substantive technical response or resolution. Urgent follow-up case: 102996497874. Please associate these cases for investigation.
Could an Apple staff member help route this to the App Store search engineering team? Please compare the ordinary and quoted queries and investigate brand-term correction/query rewriting or storefront-specific result filtering. These are hypotheses to investigate, not confirmed internal causes.
Has another developer encountered this exact ordinary-versus-quoted query difference and obtained a fix? I would appreciate actionable guidance on how to get it investigated. The request concerns a reproducible brand-query difference affecting a live Mac app and an active campaign.