Much has been made over the years about how the App Store could be improved for both developers and customers. Areas like interactive reviews, trial periods, an App Store VP and paid upgrades are all important. One of the key areas many agree is the biggest problem Apple has yet to correctly address is discovery. For small developers like myself, a potential customer’s ability to find your app on the App Store is critical. If customers can’t easily discover and download your software, your app (and indeed your business) has little chance of survival.

The App Store now has over 1.2 million apps available to consumers and with such a wide range of products, it’s more important than ever people are able to quickly find and what they are looking for. Developers have known for years that searching for something in particular doesn’t always yield the results you’d expect, but often it’s downright ridiculous.

Take Twitterrific, the 3rd party Twitter client that my company, The Iconfactory, created back in 2007 and released on the App Store in 2008. Twitterrific was there at the launch of the App Store and the latest iteration, version 5, is available even today, seven years later. Despite many 3rd party Twitter apps going the way of the dodo, Twitterrific, Tweetbot and a few other hearty Twitter clients have survived and sometimes even thrived. This despite Apple’s search results, which bear little resemblance to what a typical user might expect when searching for a simple, straightforward term like “Twitter” on the App Store.

The following list was generated by a manual App Store (iPhone) search on Nov 15th, 2014 for the term “Twitter”. To make the list easier to parse, I’ve called out all apps that allow a user to directly read AND post to Twitter in bold. Everything else is either a game, a utility, or some other social network enhancement. The official app from Twitter is naturally the first result, but the next actual Twitter client (Hootsuite) doesn’t appear on the list until #20 and the next one after that comes in at #62. Even the mega-popular Tweetbot isn’t returned in the results until position #81 and even then, the older v2 of Tweetbot (for iOS 6) comes first. Where’s Twitterrific? Although it contains the word “Twitter” in the app’s name, Twitterrific isn’t seen in the list until you scroll all the way down to #100.

1. Twitter

2. Instagram

3. Framatic

4. Tweegrow

5. Pick Jointer

6. Happy Park

7. Crop Pic

8. Wayze Social GPS

9. Flipboard

10. InstaCollage Pro

11. Symbol Keyboard

12. Find Unfollowers

13. Cool Fonts

14. Symbolizer

15. Big Emoji

16. Get Followers

17. Framatic Mess

18. Alarm Clock HD

19. Textgram

20. Hootsuite

21. Emoticon Art

22. Textizer Fonts

23. 4 For Follow

24. Pixable

25. Just Unfollow

26. Unfollow for Twitter

27. ColorEffects

28. Photobooth

29. G-Whizz

30. New Cool Text

31. Google+

32. Step

33. Tweetcaster for Twitter

34. Vine

35. Camera Awesome

36. InstaEffect Effects

37. Emoticons and Emoji

38. TwitBoost Pro

39. PickGram

40. Insta Scrapbook

41. SpaceEffect

42. Orbs

43. MB2:YouTube

44. Facetouch HD Light

45. Paper Toss Friends

46. Vodio

47. Frame UR Life

48. HayWire Text Free

49. Nimble Quest

50. InstaCollage Pro

51. TweetBoost Pro

52. Right Behind

53. Emoji>

54. Follow Tool for Twitter

55. Color Cap

56. Emoji for iOS 8

57. Camera+

58. Emoji Emoticons

59. Text2Pic

60. Emoji 2 Emoticons

61. Fonts-Cool Font Maker

62. Echofon Pro

63. LiPix Pro

64. Alarm Clock HD

65. Smilebox Moments

66. Everypost for Social Media

67. Google Apps Browser Plus

68. Clipchat

69. VPN Express

70. ÜberSocial for Twitter

71. You Doodle

72. TweetBot 2 (iOS 6)

73. Stocks Live

74. Stocks Live Essentials

75. GameFly

76. Trendyful

77. Oz Quake

78. Buffer for Social Media

79. Yahoo! News Digest

80. Wefollow for Twitter

81. TweetBot 3

82. Photo Notes HD

83. Emoji Art and Text

84. Find Unfollowers Pro

85. Followers for Twitter

86. Follower Boost for Twitter

87. Color Effects FX HD

88. Double Ball

89. TwitGrow for Twitter

90. Twittelator Pro (iOS 6)

91. Emoji Art

92. TwitBoost Pro for Twitter

93. Jedi Lightsaber

94. Get Followers for Instagram

95. Aqua Emoji Keyboard

96. Bloomberg

97. Emoji for Messaging

98. Facely HD for Facebook

99. Timehop

100. Twitterriffic 5

101. IFTTT

102. FollowBoost for Twitter

103. Hyperlapse for Instagram

104. Freebie

105. PhotoFrame

106. Text Pics Free

107. Funimate

108. Followers + for Twitter

109. Emoji Keypad

110. Follower Plus

111. TweetBoost

112. Wow Followers for Twitter

113. Table Top Racing

114. TwitBird Free for Twitter

115. Singing Texts

116. Dice World 6 Free

117. Cool Frames and Picture Effects

118. Bamboo Wallet

119. JustFollow for Instagram

120. Twitter Check

121. TurboBoost for Vine

122. PhillyD Official

123. Hybrid Fonts

124. Mixgram

125. Color Zen

126. Keyboard Pro

127. Symbol Keyboard

128. Tweetlogix for Twitter

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148. Echofon for Twitter

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167. TweetList (iOS 6)

Every app in bold on this list should precede every other app (save the official client) in the results. This is especially true of apps that are not optimized for iOS 8, yet some apps built for iOS 6 (not iOS 7, 6!) come first. Why? Why games appear on this list at all is a mystery, they are by far the least relevant and don’t even get me started on #18 “Alarm Clock HD” and #93 “Jedi Lightsaber” (really?). Twitter’s own Vine app doesn’t appear here until #34 and some would argue it should be result #2, and rightfully so. It’s obvious that Apple’s search algorithm needs adjusting so it’s weighted not towards downloads or popularity, but relevance.

Finding apps for a small niche category like Twitter clients is relatively easy. Imagine how hard it must be to find a particular game in the vast wilderness that is the App Store if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for. Until Apple decides to take definitive steps to improve search results, either via human curation, or by lowering dependencies on popularity, easy discovery in the store will continue to be a major problem. Unfortunately for small developers who need paying customers to survive, time is quickly running out.

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PS – One thing I learned while compiling this post is that there are a lot of apps that purport to help you boost your follower count on Twitter. Like tons. That and emoji apps. Who doesn’t like emoji though? 🙂

PPS – One of the ways developers let Apple know that something is broken is by filing Radar reports for a given bug or improvement. Lots of developers have filed radars for the App Store’s irrelevant search results including Radar #18265234 from Simon Booth. In his report, Simon describes just how badly a search related to his music app Smilophone returns results. If you’re an Apple dev, dupe his radar, hopefully it will do some good.