alt Hacker NewsI don’t see what that has to do with (increased) advertising on the App Store (IMO search there never has been good) or the comment you replied to in which colechristensen said: “I'm actually pretty disappointed in the lack of discovery available”.
I think paid advertising may even help improve discoverability on the App Store because, instead of making 10 or 20 to do list apps and hoping to get them to rank high by a combination of sheer luck and SEO tricks, scammers may only make one, and pay to get that to the top of the list.
In super markets product placement is affected by two factors: how much producers are willing to pay for a good spot (e.g. by offering lower wholesale prices if the product gets a more visible place) and vetting by the store owner.
I don’t think different solutions exist in the App Store. Apple doesn’t want to do much vetting, making advertising the only thing that may help (and yes, it would be awesome if there were a store that did do much vetting, but that requires a world where many different stores exist, and we aren’t there (yet))
> I think paid advertising may even help improve discoverability on the App Store
So my grandmother searching "Powerpoint" and getting malware instead of the microsoft app is good actually?
Let me compare some search terms and see if ads are giving me "better" results:
* ublock - surfshark vpn
* wordle - spammy adware word game
* slack - spammy adware game
* microsoft word - spammy spyware office app (not the one made by MS)
* every bank I could think of - different financial app
Like, this isn't a good user experience. The ads aren't relevant, even when you type in a hyper-popular app's name exactly, something like 80% of the time a competitor has sniped the top spot.
For the "microsoft word" search, the spam app had an identical logo to word, and I have no doubt many people have been fooled. If you look at the reviews, some of the 1 star reviews are detailed complaints, and all the 5 star reviews are inhuman sounding "This helped me do my job" and "great app" reviews.
> I don’t think different solutions exist in the App Store
Sorting roughly by popularity and reviews, and also doing a little more to combat fake reviews, seems like it would be better. It at least would mean that if I searched "bank name" my bank's app would come up, since for every bank I tried the first non-ad result was in fact the bank in question.
It would save grandmothers around the world who just click on the first result.