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Today ‘s major bit of iPhone App Store news is that Apple has asked developers to start adding keywords to App Store listings. Here are the details of this, posted at iLounge earlier:
Apple has begun asking developers to list keywords for their applications when submitting, in order to help with search. AppleInsider reports that developers are now asked to enter up to 255 characters worth of keywords, and that the new data will be used to help improve the search function of the App Store on the iPhone and iPod touch. ‘It is important to enter keywords for all applications as soon as possible so your application can continue to be successfully located on the App Store, ‘ the update from Apple reads. ‘Keywords can be updated with the submission of a new binary. ‘
My immediate reaction to this news is bad idea. Very bad idea, unless Apple is also going to suddenly add a lot of resources (people) to their whole apps review process, and make it a real process sometime real soon.
Far from making searches easier, I think this is immediately going to be subject to severe abuse from all of the developers of all the crap apps in the store. Every app that pretends to make the iPhone a mirror, or that offers 17,000 different fart sounds, and so on, is going to pack their keyword list with anything that associates them with the most popular and successful apps in the store.
You can already see tons of this being done within app descriptions, and I can ‘t see why keywords will be any different “ because from what I can see so far, Apple does very near zero vetting of descriptions, and likely will have no system for, or enough people to, vet keywords properly either.
Maybe I ‘m missing something obvious here, but I just think this idea is plain stupid. If this is a sign of the ‘improvements ‘ to the App Store that Apple are meant to be cooking up, then we ‘re in for a continued rough ride with the store. There are so many other more fundamental areas to improve “ communication with developers, eliminating grey areas in terms of what is and is not going to be allowed into the store, establishing clear policies for devs to work to when submitting apps, creating a real ‘process ‘ for app reviews rather than the shambles we have now, and on and on.
With all that out there crying out to be fixed, how the flying does keywords help us out?
Help me out if you can “ let me know what I ‘m missing, and why this is a great idea
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TAGS: stupid App Store decisions
