Starting from July, 16, we all had a unique opportunity to become fantastic novel protagonists, captured into the alien experiment: something just went wrong with AppStore ranking system. But what exactly went wrong - we can only guess.
The rank of popular iPad apps began to drastically decrease - hundreds of positions per day. Including buth paid, and free applications. Applications were kicked off from tops per category and overall store tops.
Free application Facebook Messenger for iPad fell down in several countries including USA and UK. Both in Social Networking category, and in overall top.
Free games Clash of Clans and Game of War fell down in all categories and both countries.
The same situation occurred with paid Minecraft game, which means, that changes were applied both to paid and free apps.
Now let’s take a look on apps, that did not fell in ranks.
For example, corporate messaging app Slack actually gained a few positions in rating.
If you look carefully at iPhone section, you won’t see that kind of changes:
All in all, if you look at graphs, you will see, that those changes are finished, and everything returned to it’s the normal state.
What was that?
Obviously, Apple is testing new ranking algorithms in the store. Most likely, Apple was going to examine the way new parameters affect revenue generation and how new parameters can give a chance to succeed for potentially profitable applications. So, which parameters could be added to the ranking algorithms?
Which parameters can it be? There are several speculations:
1) Motivated traffic
2) Absence of bot-driven installs
3) Login regularity
4) Retention
So, aside from base parameters: audience size, payment amounts - we could expect them to become much more important in the nearest future. And if you do not track them - there is a real threat, that those metrics can strike you back.
Apple could be preparing for iOS 9 in that way. We can expect to see the results of new experiments affecting global rankings. Let’s keep track of updates, and wait for the new changes in the App Store. What a thrilling experience…
