App Store Discovery Request

April 2, 2012 by Sensei
Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: apple | mobile

Like most iOS developers, I’ve expressed my fair share of rants on the App Store’s discovery woes.  I remain hopeful that their acquisition of Chomp could lead to some very interesting/rewarding solutions.  In the meantime, however, I’d like to toss out one idea into the mixer that would not require any UI overhauls and I believe would make a drastic difference.

Its a simple feature request:  I would like to be able to hide apps from the results.  Currently, when I load up the top 25 I’d say over 90% of the results are things I am not interested in.  Similar to when I check my mail, I would like to be able to do a swipe gesture on apps in the list and have a red hide button appear over their title.  Clicking on the hide button would have a similar result to archiving a read e-mail.  The email will no longer appear in my inbox but I can still find it if I search for it.  In the case of apps, anything I hide would not appear in my top 25, but I could still find them if I searched.  Thus, I could hide all of the apps I own (I believe gizmodo suggested filtering apps you own from the list) and then I could also hide apps I see day in and day out that I know I will never buy.

By adding this simple feature the Top 25 quickly becomes MY top 25.  I will be exposed to many more apps and thus will most likely be making more purchases.  Apple will most likely see more diversity and healthier numbers in their top 100 as a result.