That has now changed.

The list is greatly reduced while searching for top downloaded apps. Actually it seems you just get the app and a bunch of unrelated but other high-download apps in the results. Search for something specific like “Koi Pond” and you get five results. There’s no opportunity for similar apps to compete. If I were looking for something Koi Pond [ish] how would I find it?

This is bad news for new developers because it makes it even more difficult to get noticed in an ever crowded app marketplace. Without a big marketing budget upcoming developers must lean heavily on independent review sites.

Note: Generic searches like “font” will still return many pages of results. It’s the competition getting blocked on popular apps which is the focus of this article.

The feedback ratings system used by iTunes was busted before iTunes 8.1 was released. The new version of iTunes makes some adjustments to improve the effectiveness of the rating system, but problems will persist.

Last year (2008) iPhone developers were gaming the system in various ways to artificially move their apps up the ratings system, to the top of the Top 10 lists. Comments could be posted by anyone whether they downloaded the app or not. This led to significant developer abuses of positive comment spamming their own apps and negative comment spamming the competition. We’ve been the target of such spam ourselves. Apple tried to plug that hole by requiring people to actually own the app before leaving comments. But free-to-download apps are still getting flamed with negative spam and paid apps are getting purchased just to leave negative comments. This problem, though addressed by Apple, persists and cannot be completely eliminated.

iTunes 8.1 tweaks the ratings system a couple of ways. First, versions are now rated rather than the app as a whole. This is a good move because version 1.0 apps are commonly released without a complete feature set, with the intent of filling those features in future releases. A version-based rating system encourages future development.

Second is a simple Rate this software button which makes it easy to give an app a rating of one to five stars without leaving comments. Simplicity will encourage use. This will hopefully result in more valid ratings which would tend to dilute the spam comments. Note that a similar way to rate apps appeared in the iPhone 2.2 software update whereby you could rate the app after deleting it. But this has been widely criticized as skewing ratings downward because, let’s face it, if you’re deleting an app you’re probably not happy with it.

All in all the changes are positive. But there isn’t an especially good review system in place and would-be app shoppers are still best served by consulting independant reviews before making purchase decisions.