Tomas Chlebek Bloomberg cites anonymous sources moving into the middle of the action when it reports on Apple's "secret team" tasked with exploring possible avenues for further development of the App Store.
The App Store has become an essential part of the company since its launch in 2008, not only thanks to the thirty percent profit from each app sold, but also thanks to the creation of a specific ecosystem for each iOS device user. With its potential, it both encourages customers to join it by investing in an iOS device, and makes it difficult to leave it if someone is considering switching to a competitor.
Currently, the App Store offers over 1,5 million applications and users have downloaded them more than a hundred billion times. However, such an extensive offer represents a challenge for new developers trying to apply themselves to users looking for new interesting applications.
Apple is said to have put together a team of around a hundred people, including many engineers who previously worked on iAd platform, and is reportedly led by Todd Teresi, an Apple vice president and former head of iAd. This team is tasked with finding out how to enable better orientation in the App Store for both parties.
One of the investigated possibilities is the model extended especially by companies such as Google and Twitter. It consists in sorting the search results according to who paid extra for greater visibility. So an App Store app developer could pay Apple to show it primarily in searches for keywords like "soccer game" or "weather."
The last time the App Store worked was clearly changing to beginning of March, when the change in its leadership from december last year. Under Phil Schiller's leadership, the categories on the store's main page began to be updated more frequently. It contributed to better orientation in the largest store with paid applications in the world In 2012 also the acquisition and subsequent implementation of Chomp's technologies.
Well, I don't know if this is the right way. If apple were to put behind applications that have not been updated for a long time or applications that lack new functions... I think that would be a good solution to push developers to optimize more. On the app store, we can come across a lot of applications that have not yet been updated for large displays, I am not talking about multitasking, 3D touch or the landscape version for the plus IP or the version for the iPad. In this way, there is a lot of ballast in the app store that rather worsens the user experience, and in my opinion apple should deal with this before solving subscription models for developers.