How does Apple AppStore rank search results? - ios

guys :)
I have an iOS application - an alarm clock. I released it a little over a month ago. Initially it was paid, but when I saw there were virtually no purchases (from 0 to 4 a day), I changed it to be free for a period of time. When it become free, in less than 10 days it has been downloaded more than 30,000 times, and more importantly (I think) it moved much higher in the search results when the user searches "alarm" - it reached 20th place in the results. During that time I also received very good reviews in the AppStore. But today I changed it back to paid, and now when I search "alarm" my app is shown at the bottom of the 4TH PAGE. Given that one page contains 120 apps, this is very bad for me and I don't understand why this happened. Can anyone tell me how does AppStore ranks search results and is there a way to move my app higher in the rankings, please? :) Huge thanks!

Paid and free are different sections of the app store. AFAIK, they are ranked independently of each other. It's not uncommon for a half-decent free app to climb the rankings quickly after appearing, since it gets a showing in the "new and noteworthy" section, which gets a lot of traffic.

Related

App Store Connect does not show all sales - why?

In order to be able to better estimate the revenue income of our app, we implemented a Database function that reliably (we tested it in Sandbox mode) increases a subscription counter for the subscription that was made by one once a subscription has been made.
This function is only triggered once an in-app purchase has been successful (i.e. when we receive the feedback from StoreKit to enable the Premium functions). Now, we have found enormous discrepancies between the data we observed and the data App Store Connect gives us.
For the past two days, upon confirmation of purchase via StoreKit, our app has 13 times enabled premium functions on a monthly subscription basis, and 14 times on a yearly subscription basis.
However, App Store Connect tells us we had one yearly subscription and 5 monthlies.
Furthermore, for the one premium subscription that generated sales of $5.60, Apple has added proceeds of $3.73 - but that's more than 30% commission. That's almost 35%.
The sales that Apple has not accounted for amount to more than $70.
Can anybody explain to me what's going on, why Apple is not showing us subscriptions that definitely happened and takes more commission than agreed?
My bet is that you are not aggregating the prices correctly on your database side. It is extremely complicated thing to do, despite superficially seeming simple.
The second guess is that ItunesConnect revenue is delayed by day or three (they were experiencing delays).
If you want to see know the revenue calculation is done correctly, I recommend hooking yourself to RevenueCat (quite simple process), and to double check numbers.
Regarding the price, don’t forget their is also sales tax/VAT that is deducted too. Eg. Any sales made in the UK will have 20% vat removed, then Apple takes 30% and you get the rest.

Appstore takes time based on screens

I have an app, A small app with 4-5 screens, I remember appstore usually takes 1-2 days.
So my question is if i have another app that haves 80 screens, Is the time to be approve is the same or it will take more time ?
First of all App Store usually approves application in 24 hours as per new rules. So all applications with average features will get approval.
Here is an official statement from Apple Team :
On average, 50% of apps are reviewed in 24 hours and over 90% are
reviewed in 48 hours. If your submission is incomplete, review times
may be further delayed or your app may be rejected. Once your app has
been reviewed, its status will be updated and you will be notified.
So the App Store approval time will not vary according to the number of screens application have. But It can be on basis of complexity of features application have. On basis of that it can take time.
I have seen so many apps having 20-30 screens get approval in 24 hours & on the other side some of the applications have hardly 4-5 screens but have some lengthy advance features which needs more detailed review time takes more time.
But still as apple team mentioned in the official statement maximum time in the 90% cases is 48 hours only. So within 2 days they will approve your application even if it has more screens.
Hope this helps to everyone.

Swift 3/ iTunesConnect track app sales live

As opposed to Google Play Console, I can't find a way to check the amount of app sales being made in real time. I am not a patient person so I'd like to be able to check this information multiple times throughout the day.
At the moment, I track my website's performance with Google Analytics so I can see how many people visit the app's manual compared to the amount of people who did the same thing 7 days ago. However, this value can vary up to 40% while having the same amount of app sales so it's not a very good indicator.
The app is dependent on a very small footprint so including a framework that tracks usage statistics would be overkill. I only need a way to get notified how many people have opened this app today. Have you implemented this somewhere in your own projects? Or is there even a section for that in iTunesConnect?
You could log an event with Google Analytics called "App Opened" or something where the label is the identifierForVendor. Another option is to create an UUID and store it in UserDefaults, and use that as the label.
By checking the number of events with a unique label you could see the amount of installs.
This wouldn't require you to add a new framework or to implement anything else.

iAd revenue randomly decreases

Hi I am a new iOS developer with my first app in the App Store implementing iAd. I have been watching the iAd console that displays my revenue for each day and total revenue. My question is, why might my total revenue be going down even though the average eCPM has not gone down since I last checked. I had more money.yestersay than I do today according to the posted total revenue and was just curious if anyone could fill me in? Thanks !
I currently have an app with iAd in the App Store too. I never really got into the reason for some changes in eCPM but I noticed that at the end of the day it seemed like I got the same amount of money as the days before. I guess apples system is not always as precise in this things. I would suggest you to just wait and see if everything comes back in place. :)

Approval time for in app purchase product

For adding in app purchase products, how long does apple normally take to approve one of them? I have like hundreds of in app products and i wonder how long it will take for all to be approved.
It usually takes anywhere from 1-2 weeks depending on how busy it is. If you have like hundreds it may take a few months to get them all approved but then again, apple doesn't check everything, just a lot of them so probably 1-3 months.

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