Apple App Search Shows Only One Result At A Time

iOS 6 was released yesterday and the new App Store and App Store search results are now in the hand of many iOS users. With that, Apple has changed the search results to display only one search result at a time. Yes, when you use the App Store to search for apps on your iOS […]

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App Store IconiOS 6 was released yesterday and the new App Store and App Store search results are now in the hand of many iOS users. With that, Apple has changed the search results to display only one search result at a time.

Yes, when you use the App Store to search for apps on your iOS device, Apple will show a new user interface that only shows you one search result at a time. Developers and users are calling this broken because many iOS users won’t bother to look beyond the first result to find the best possible app.

Here are screen shots of the new search results interface on iOS 6 on an iPhone 4:

App Search One App Search Two

As you can see, it is even somewhat unclear if you can slide the page right and left to get more search results.

Not too long ago, Apple change their app store ranking algorithms and many experts are saying that the best results are no longer the first results. Either way, showing one result in a app store with hundreds of thousands of apps available, might not be the best user experience.

Recently, Microsoft Bing began showing more than 10 results on a page while Google began showing seven or less in some cases.

This new app search experience in the App Store will result in less diverse set of apps being downloaded by users, lead to searcher confusion, fewer happier iOS users and lots of upset developers.


About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.

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