One thing we inadvertently become a bit desensitized to around here at TouchArcade is just how absurd a lot of the things about the mobile ecosystem actually are. Scam apps are totally normal, one developer flooding the App Store with 100 slightly differently themed slot machine games is just another Tuesday, and the App Store search advertising showing a competing game before the actual game you’re searching for is just how it works. When you take a step back from all this, it’s super messed up, as Epic founder Tim Sweeney discovers in a series of tweets that are getting a lot of traction:
Ok, let’s try to find Fortnite on the iOS App Store. What’s the top result? pic.twitter.com/nypYHctyDC
— Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) July 19, 2018
PUBG is an awesome game, but it’s probably not the thing someone typing “Fortnite” is looking for. Ok, so let’s search for PUBG then: pic.twitter.com/3cvxF7Kpqb
— Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) July 19, 2018
I haven’t played Kick the Buddy, but it looks pretty cool. So let’s try searching for it: pic.twitter.com/gaQfK1cWlK
— Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) July 19, 2018
Let’s search for iTunes: pic.twitter.com/eL920cwAdz
— Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) July 19, 2018
Amazon Prime Video: pic.twitter.com/EHDbMqucAW
— Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) July 19, 2018
Really, how did we get to this state? The store prioritizes ad revenue above user intent, so now developers buy ads in front of each others’ products so that exactly nobody’s search results lead to the actual thing they typed. Who in this cycle isn’t crazy?
— Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) July 19, 2018
And, well, it’s hard to argue with the conclusion. When I’ve tweeted similar dumb examples of this happening over the years, the only real vaguely reasonable rebuttal to this being allowed is “How else is your game supposed to get traction?" Which… I mean, I guess? It just seems real weird to me to be able to squat actual legit trademarked words in search results. If PUBG and Fortnite want to fight over who spends the most advertising money to show up first when someone searches for “shooter," “battle royale," “multiplayer," or similar… That makes sense. Specific, trademarked game titles though? That feels gross. Or, hell, maybe when someone searches for a specific thing that thing should show up first with the ad second?
It seems like there’s a ton of things that could be done to this system to make it feel less gross, but, unfortunately, it’d actively be asking Apple to make less money on the App Store monopoly so the chances of any of that happening is exactly 0%.
I think the ads should be less prominent—maybe some combination of smaller, darker, or lower down. (I know people don't notice the little "Ad" badge in practice.)
Being able to buy into a keyword that is an existing trademark is actually good in one way: it gives a one-person/no-venture-capital operation (like myself) a chance to be noticed in a category dominated by big names and review-farmers.
(That said, I've found App Store ads to be useless in my brief testing. But in THEORY, getting my app advertised when someone searches for the big fish could be helpful one day. I still don't want it to look like it's "the" search result, though. That's truly crazy.)
How is this any different from google? Search fortnite in google and the first link is an Ad as well because Epic Games paid for it to be placed there. It is the same exact thing. Paid Ads are shown first then non-paid results. Maybe they should pay Apple to place the ad for fortnite first like they are doing with Google? Odds are pubg paid for a spot in the appstore, they assigned a meta tag with their ad named 'fortnite' to make sure that their game shows up first when the word fortnite is searched. Epic really can't complain about that, you gotta play the marketing game. Maybe they need to get their marketing people on the ball instead of complaining about it.
I don’t disagree at all with the sentiment, but I have to point out that the screenshots themselves are slightly misleading in that they have the bottom half of the image cropped off and most likely they would be showing the first, non-ad search result which would presumably be the game/app that was being searched for. I mean, on the iPad, you can comfortably view 4-6 results on screen at the same time, on the iPhone you can see at least two. And those ads DO feature a label that clearly specifies them as an ad and also show up as a different color. I have never felt deceived by App Store search results as opposed to something like ads in a Google search which work MUCH harder to look natural.
For comparison, this is what a search for Fortnite looks like on my iPhone X: https://uploads.disquscdn.c...
And I just got this one, with the same relevant results. Maybe Tim plays PUBG a lot?
https://uploads.disquscdn.c...
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Haha I just noticed neither of us has linked Fortnite to our AppStore accounts. 😂
heh you both live in a crappy country lol... https://uploads.disquscdn.c...
Totally agree with Tim that it's a bit nuts advertisers can squat on the search result for a completely unrelated game. I just find it a bit funny that Tim is the one crying foul when his company's top game boasts over $1,000,000,000 in revenue :-P
This does seem to need against Apples ethos of charging more money for the devices, but then putting the user experience first.