On the new store front of iOS 6 App Store

Let put this up simply: there are really good things about the new App Store design with iOS 6. But there is also very bad things. Following this article, I want to expose my own and very simple experience with application searching.

Let's open the App Store on my iPhone then hit the search box and type: Passwords. Let's see what are the password related apps available to me. As you already know, the results are displayed in a card style view. But just before hitting the Search button on the keyboard, I get a list of about 10 items which are shown here. 

How is this list of suggestions built? Why only 10 items? Why some items seems to be generalized keywords but others seems to be exact application names? Next, let's see the results.

Showing 1 of 1707 cards. Now let's start the swiping game. First, the thing isn't fluid at all on an iPhone 4S on a wifi network. Second, after 97 swipes, the App Store crashed on me. Opening it again to find out that I had to redo the whole thing again. Is this the better way to show a list of 1707 items on a small screen? I doubt it. It is nice visually but the effectiveness falls short. Is this the only thing Apple kept from their Chomp acquisition earlier this year? Could we have to wait a little bit longer before we see the real fruit of their effort? Time will tell. Meanwhile, we all agree that discoverablity was and is still a problem on the App Store and that Apple isn't good at all at indexing content and providing results following a search.

Apptrace - a new app tracking service is born

Just found out about Apptrace, a new app tracking service currently in beta.

apptrace is the fastest app analysis service! Built by developers for developers. apptrace is maintained by an exceptional team of developers with extensive mobile experience. Giving you exceptional data, to further your business intelligence in the apposphere. It is the most efficient and intelligent way to trace apps on this changing global market.

So far I like the service and just registered for their weekly report. According to an interview with David Meyer from Gigaom, the App Store is currently "infested" with more than 400 000 zombie apps (apps that gets no download at all!).

Interesting App Store stats

According to an App Annie's blog post, here is a summary of interesting App Store stats.

• Revenue per download: 37 cents in Norway, 22 cents in US, 4 cents in China
• Fastest growth of downloads: China +298% with revenue +187%
• Apps with In-App purchases monetizes at 2.2 times more than those without In-App purchases.
• iPad download increases at +200% growth compared to iPhone at +70%
• iPad generates 2 times more revenues than iPhone

In other words: build iPad apps with In-App purchases and make them localized for China and Japanese.