As of May 27 @ 4 AM PST we believe we found a solution to this issue please see this updated post for details.
I hope for this email to reach the attention of someone who can take action to resolve the issue described.
This bug within the App Store affects our business directly, and if it goes unresolved for much longer it will force myself and the developers that work for me out of business as developers for the Apple iPhone.
Please respond to this email to let me know that it has been read and that steps are being taken to resolve the issue. Details follow.
Our app (eMees Avatar Creator) contains a text description that was entered in iTunes Connect since its launch in January 2009.
Since the initial 1.0 version was available it has ranked well within the top 100 paid apps of every category we have entered it into.
Unfortunately, however, since our most recent update (version 1.3) of the app our entire description has become invisible to the native search functionality built into iTunes and the App Store on the iPhone/iPod Touch.
We have tested this very thoroughly and we cannot find a single keyword or phrase that will reveal our app within search results except for the 3 words that appear within our app title “eMees” “Avatar” or “Creator”. These are the ONLY words that will yield results in search as they are the only words within our app title.
The search mechanism however usually indexes and provides results for the text description (not just the title) of other apps. For a time, before April 27th this case was also true for our app.
Of course only Apple knows about the internal workings search mechanism and results usually vary with different search implementations. However from testing we have found with certainty that our app description is completely excluded from search. This is unusual and it is of course bad for our business as we are no longer visible to users that utilize the search function.
As a test we recently inserted a unique keyword string into our app description “Gnirtstset” (without quotes on the description). Presumably if content is being indexed on our description at all there should be a strong chance of us being listed when a user searches for this string.
We have also asked two other developers whom we know personally to insert this keyword into their description in order to have a controlled test.
Both of these developers apps (”Dapple” and “Squished”) appear when this keyword (”Gnirtstset”) is used. However our app, which also includes this keyword does not appear.
The results of this keyword search can be invoked in iTunes by following this URL:
http://tinyurl.com/Gnirtstset
We inserted this special keyword into our description 72 hours prior to asking these developers to do the same for the test.
At this time the result is still the same. Both of the other developers apps appear while ours does not. As mentioned before, we cannot find a single keyword or phrase (except those words in our title) that will reveal via search.
This is highly unusual, as we are very familiar with our “searchability” and since before April 27th most if not all of our description was “searchable”.
I believe this bug has already affected other developers who have documented it in your forums here:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1706838&tstart=105
This issue seems to have existed since September 2008 and has still not been resolved.
2 users reported that they did not receive the “App ready for sale” email for their application prior to this issue affecting them. We are all of course used to receiving this email once our app is ready. I can tell you personally that I also did not receive this email for the version 1.3 update. So the symptom and problem appear to be exactly the same as the developers reporting the issue in the forum.
I have attached to this email two screen captures of the test search with results on both the iPhone and within iTunes on OS X.
Further, I have also documented the issue on video and posted it to YouTube which you will find here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp5ueTySqVI&fmt=18. This video very plainly describes the issue and shows that it is a bug.
This is not the result of search being selective of keywords, it is in fact excluding our description completely from your search index.
I would like to see this issue resolved specifically for our application. We are losing rank on our chosen category on the App Store very quickly and I believe if it is not resolved very soon it will put us out of business.
Please RSVP to this email to let me know that you are aware of this issue and are taking steps to correct it and how long I should expect to wait until the issue is resolved for our application.
Thank You.
Jordan Wan
Software Development Manager
Smallmedium