Apple is releasing a new search engine for finding apps in their store. Not sure if that applies to local stores as well, but that is not my point. And also I won't discuss if that will make apps more discoverable. I think Apple editorial content was already helping some of the more useful apps out there to take off. What was proven is that Top x apps is completely worthless by definition. It's like seeing Winzip and VLC listed in Windows software websites : what are those Top x apps worth for?

Anyway my point is that I knew it was coming. Perhaps Apple is doing it now because it senses that much of iOS developers are gaining little if at all from their apps and that may become a real problem with iOS developers essentially giving up because of the lack of revenue. So a little help from Apple was needed. I think Apple should go beyond this by the way and simply pay iOS developers anytime the app being published have any value. After all, those apps promote the use of iOS devices so iOS developers are Apple employees with no pay (in much the same way than WIN32 Windows developers have been helping Microsoft for decades without being paid).

My point then? I saw it coming because I had clues about it. The clues were that when, last year, I shipped a WIN32 tool for searching Excel spreadsheets using a Google-like search engine (words can be incorrectly typed and that still works), within days of my publishing, I saw Apple.com in the referrers of my website. There was something going on. And given that my software was not relying on ads to get known, you can also gather that some people over at Apple are watching Google results related to searching stuff. There you have it.