The Honeymoon is Over

Apple has had a year, but the glacial pace of improvements to the App Store haven’t done anything to fix the fundamental problems with running a business focused on iPhone application development. A year grace period is enough and now it looks like the honeymoon is over.

Marco Arment: Serious Doubts and App Store Adds Search Keyword Fields for Apps
Riverturn: There’s No App for That
Justin Williams: Where Do I Sign Up?
Layton Duncan: The Emperor’s New Clothes

Developer sentiment has shifted. These feelings have been there for a long time, but now people are blogging more about the problems and they are getting linked by more highly prominent sites. It’s only a matter of time before the bigger names in indie development chip in, too.

I can easily see a day where all that is available are garbage, throw-away 99¢ apps and apps from bigger companies who feel they “have” to be present on the App Store.

App Store Search to Soon Use Keywords

If you log in to iTunes Connect, you’ll be presented with the following message:

Keywords must now be entered for your applications on iTunes Connect. Customers will be able to search the App Store by your designated keywords. You must separate your keywords by commas when entering them on the application information page and are limited to 255 characters

This refreshing news. Too bad it was rushed out.

First, the limit is actually 100 characters. You’ll discover this if you enter more than that limit and save. Unfortunately, the second problem is that while there is an error message informing you of the real limit, the keywords field is now disabled and you can’t edit it. You have to cancel out of the page and come back.

Beyond the obvious bugs, a character counter would be nice. And as Marco points out, some guidelines about how the keywords will be used would help. Stemming? Phrases? Simple misspellings?