Filed under: Apple Corporate, iPhone, App Store, iPod touch
Apple adds keywords to App Store additions
Earlier this week, Apple took a step towards making iPhone and iPod touch apps easier to find. Specifically, developers can now add comma-separated keywords to their apps, up to 255 characters. Hopefully this will make it easier to find apps, because it's certainly not easy now. The categories are so vast and each one so densely packed (there are 65,000+ apps in the store as of this writing), that finding the one app that will do what I want is a chore.
Keywording is a small step, but as Tim Cook noted in last week's earnings conference call, there is plenty of room for "further improvement" in app listings and search/accessibility for finding the apps you want.
Since the store's purpose is to drive iPhone sales (from Apple's perspective), we're sure they're motivated to get it right.
Update: At least one developer is reporting an issue with the new service.
[via AppleInsider]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Thomas said 11:42AM on 7-29-2009
My only issue with keywords is that it's very easy to build up a huge list of keywords, if you don't label everything properly you miss out a lot of stuff and the quality of searches then decreases. It's just like having categories, once you exceed a certain number of apps you start needing more categories, but once you start adding categories it becomes confusing as to what category you should look in. I just hope that there is some monitoring as to what keywords developers are using so they don't use inappropriate stuff or popular but unrelated ones.
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Dave Wood said 11:52AM on 7-29-2009
100 character max, not 255
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Brian said 12:10PM on 7-29-2009
Hopefully with a 100 character limit, they'll stick to pertinent keywords. I've noticed that if you keyword search the dB, you often get results that aren't related, but they have a reference somewhere within their app description. This means that they often litter the bottom of their app description with the names of their competitors or other apps they want their app to list with when we do searches. It's very frustrating.
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Rishi said 12:21PM on 7-29-2009
Yup, only 100 characters for us too.
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Alex Robert said 12:27PM on 7-29-2009
MobileMe iDisk app is out!!!
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hmlong said 12:52PM on 7-29-2009
They really need to add subcategory trees. Take books. Did you want a book lookup app? A book reader app like Kindle or Stanza? Or an actual book? Fiction or non-fiction? SciFi or mystery?
And you need YouTube-style sorting: Most recent, most popular today, this week, overall.
The App Store has a lot of apps, and it needs a lot of ways to find them and browse through them.
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michaeldavidcohen said 1:35PM on 7-29-2009
Be very careful about what keywords you put in. Once you submit them you can only change the keywords when you upload a new binary.
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Aaron Ardiri said 5:21PM on 7-29-2009
wow.. nasty :)
samuel said 7:34PM on 7-29-2009
That system's only going to get abused, have you seen photo stock websites.. photographers routinely add whole sentences to the keyword field. I hate that.
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tim said 8:19PM on 7-29-2009
I'd love to be excited about it but there are so many things they SHOULD do in addition that I can only be a little less annoyed at them. The number huge of missing categories/sub-categories has been obvious since at least last December.
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Leslie said 2:39PM on 7-30-2009
The keywords have been very helpful.
They did this for the launch of our new Weekly World News App. Quite funny :)
http://www.weeklyworldnewsapp.com/main.html
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Steven said 8:36AM on 8-01-2009
I logged in the other day to change a typo and noticed I had to enter some keywords to properly save. I hit the (?) link for help but it was broken. I went ahead and typed a few keywords in, thinking I could change them later.
Now sales are down 75% and I can't log in to change my keywords. The limit has also been updated to 255 chars but I'm still operating off 100 chars.
Looks like I'll have to submit a new binary and wait a couple weeks.
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