App Store Rankings Moving Again

For those developers that released a new app on Thursday, you picked the wrong time to do so. Even if your app was popular, it wouldn't have shown up in the App Store rankings. Beginning last Thursday and continuing until early Monday morning the rankings were frozen. So, if your app just made the list, you were in luck. It stayed in place for nearly five days regardless of how many copies of the app were actually sold. According to MobileCrunch, this isn’t the first time something like this has happened. In fact, it was nearly a year ago when the App Store rankings last went frozen. MobileCrunch reported:

Oddly enough, a similar thing happened almost exactly one year ago. On November 5th, 2009, the US App Store rankings went on lock down. Things returned to normal just 48 hours later, with one exception: updates to applications no longer bumped them to the top of the “Recently Released” list, foiling the plans of developers who were flooding the App Store with minor updates to boost their numbers. It’s unclear what (if anything) changed this time around, though I’ve got a handful of people whispering that the whole thing boils down to Apple spending the halloween weekend overhauling the App Store’s ranking algorithms.

This issue only affected the U.S. App Store. And, whatever the reason behind it (Apple provided no comment), the rankings are working again.

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