Daringfireball.net Website Review

MALICE OR INCOMPETENCE: ON THE RANKINGS OF APPLE’S OWN APPS IN APP STORE RESULTS. Jack Nicas and Keith Collins, reporting for The New York Times on Monday > Presented with the results of the an*lysis, two senior Apple > executives acknowledged in a recent interview that, for more than a > year, the top results of many common searches in the iPhone App > Store were packed with the company’s own apps. That was the case > even when the Apple apps were less relevant and less popular than > ones from its competitors. The executives said the company had since > Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president who oversees the > App Store, and Eddy Cue, the senior vice president who oversees many > of the Apple apps that benefited from the results, said there was > nothing underhanded about the algorithm the company had built to > “There’s nothing about the way we run search in the App Store > that’s designed or intended to drive Apple’s do*nloads of our > own apps,” Mr. Schiller said. “We’ll present results based on > what we think the user wants.” The clear implication of The Times’s story, despite Schiller and Cue’s denials, is that Apple is engaging in anti-competitive behavior to favor its own apps in search results. That’s certainly worth an investigation. And it’s also the case that just about every antitrust investigation of Google, globally, centers on how they rank their own properties atop search results. appreciating for the way its graphics were presented interactively. Excellent data presentation. The best response I’ve seen, though, is developer David Barnard’s. Barnard is a longtime iOS developer and keen observer of how the App Store — whether through design, ineptitude, or chicanery — affects third-party apps > “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by > stupidity.” App Store search has been an unmitigated disaster