It’s not clear whether or not the Cupertino company caved to developer unrest ,but Apple has remodeled the App Store iTunes directory with some overnight design alterations.
Now the iTunes store lists both Top Free Apps and Top Paid Apps for each individual App category. This sort of set up has been on the iPhone since the most recent firmware update and now users who need to download large apps or just want to browse the App Store from iTunes can benefit from the broader listing layout.
Bellyaching developer’s are surely relieved by the sound of this, and apps that haven’t seen the light of day are now enjoying some worthwhile real estate in the store.
Well, seriously, that does not help much.
What they need is two distict entry points (1 private/entertainment/games) and 1 for business (suitable apps might appear in both) and seperate “top 10″ lists for both; if I research business apps in my open plan office, I do not want to see dozens of “fart my finger” apps all over my 30″ screen. And they need to guide developers on how to choose categories… things show up in the weirdest places (a hot spot finder under economy, dictionaries under finance, even games under economy… – this is most useless).
The biggest problem however is the middle column… it does not contain any useful information (it duplicates the category name and the release date is meaningless). They must get developers to supply an one sentence description, e.g. “this app is for mileage tracking” and put it right there, otherwise searching for programs is a nightmare.
What does “top” mean? Most downloads ever? Highest download average? Highest daily downloads? A little help would be nice!
The App Store ranking algorithm is based on the most downloads. I’m not sure if it is most downloads ever, or most downloads within a given time period (week?).