Apple App Store Visibility

Apple recently sent a survey asking for people to evaluate their iPhone developer program. TechCrunch covered it here.

Here are some of my thoughts on what Apple could do to help developers gain visibility for their app:

1. Deeper category tree. Within "Role Playing" how about creating sub-categories like: Sports, Rogue-like, Turn Based, Action, Pets, Adult... etc.

2. Let users categorize apps. End users will know better than anyone else. If there could be some type of categorization feature along with the review process, I think that might help "police" the apps into making sure they are in the right category. Especially if you have the sub-categories I mentioned above.

3. Any additional data you can give developers on how users are finding apps. Look at google's keyword tool. Something like that would be helpful to make sure I'm using the right keywords for people to find my app. Although that's a double edged sword, as you don't want people using the keyword tool to just spam their app incorrectly. Also, I don't have any insight into how many people view my description either in the app store or in iTunes and then decide not to purchase. Nor can I track how well a particular advertisement converts.

4. Combine all apps that are the same in the top 100 lists. Instead of 3 Mafia Wars apps all with different "in game credits", there should only be 1 entry in the top 100 apps list for that game. Epic Pet wars has 11 entries as I look today in the top 100 paid Role Playing games category. If you combined those, then more apps would be visible and the app with 11 entries, would be appropriately higher up the charts due to it's combined download count.