Deviating Eye

There are now 500,000 iPhone and iPad apps.  Yes, read that again.  500,000 apps.  That's an incredible and praiseworthy achievement for Apple, and more so for iOS developers.

But there is still a glaring problem.  In iOS marketing books, there's a lot of discussion on how to make your app and your company very visible.  Aside from winning a design award or being the Apple staff's favorite, there are obvious things that can be done outside of the App Store — advertise your app on your website so it can be found via Google searches, submit press releases to widely read websites and blogs, market through the web and social media, etc.  But why is making an iOS app visible so important?  Reread the first sentence of this blog.

The very thing that makes the App Store a success is also its biggest shortcoming.  There are so many apps that it's very difficult to make yours stand out among the hordes of other apps.  The App Store has broad categories such as Productivity and Entertainment, and apps can be listed under more than one category.  How then can a novice user find out that your amazing, incredible, Nobel Prize-worthy app exists, and what it does, through the App Store?  For a general search, the app's name or developer's name can be included in the search. Searches for a word can produce a list of hundreds of apps, but some novice users may only look at the items that appear in the search text box's attached pop-up menu. The full list of search results may be hundreds of apps. Searches for synonyms of the search term can produce a different number of apps. These related searches may find apps in common or completely different apps. Not all will be relevant — search for the word "bird," and not surprisingly many of the apps will be variants of "Angry Birds".