Mobile application search who will dominate

At present, the total number of apps store and Google Play in the world's two largest mobile app stores has surpassed 700,000, and it is now possible to search for high quality applications that are inseparable from the user experience. Regardless of how chaotic the competitive landscape of the mobile application search market is, the Battle of Kings will eventually compete in the two giants of the technology industry, Apple and Google.

In just a few years, the mobile ecosystem has become a "jungle" of sight: The total number of apps in the world's two largest mobile app stores, Apple's App Store and Google Play, now exceeds 700,000.

But we are still looking forward to moving apps into the "Google Era", free from today's mess. Though it has high hopes for Google, it still wants him to be based on the original.

There are many independent application search companies that have entered this market to accept the challenge. For example, applications such as Appflow, Kinetik, crosswalk, DISCOVR Apps, AppsFire, Xyo, appolicious, and hubbl find applications and search engines. The application search engine Quixey announced a contract with Ask.com this month to start providing application search technology for the latter. Google also quietly launched its own "application" search vertical services.

But instead of searching the internet for most apps, users are searching for apps on mobile devices. When users expand their search on a mobile device, they tend to use the default store on the device. In fact, according to Nielsen's statistics, 63% of users search for apps in this way.

Applying search to the King's battle

Because of the way the mobile ecosystem itself was born, third-party mobile app search/Discovery developers will have difficulty getting into this area, after all, the mobile ecosystem is different from Google's indexing of the exponential growth of the Internet. In addition, some proprietary data is not accessible to third-party developers. Google and Apple have the power to use downloads and uninstall, as well as important data such as the number of applications opened and the number of times they were pushed.

At the same time, if any company has made significant progress in this area, Apple or Google will buy the company and integrate its technology into its own app store. This is likely to happen in the future, given Apple's acquisition of app Search and discovery engine Chompchomp.

On the mobile side, the Battle of the Kings of the application search engine will eventually be staged between the two big technology giants, Apple and Google. For Google, it has taken a head start in the fight. Google App Store search algorithms are indexed today by application description, while Apple's app Search service focuses on keywords and headlines.

"Google has also made clear that the number and quality of Google Play pages are an important indicator of the pros and cons of the application," said Ian Sefferman, CEO of MOBILEDEVHQ, a Ian Seffman that helps app developers improve rankings. "It's a smart move, something Apple can't easily do," he said. ”

Seffman applies the search for today's situation to the early development of Internet search: "When we compare application search and web search, I tend to refer to situations that have been going on for about 1997 years." That is, the industry has realised that application search will become extremely important, and it has become a hot topic for many people, like Alta Vista, Lycos, and so on around 1997, but we haven't found the ideal model for it to work as well as Google. ”

And what about the Google Apps search vertical services mentioned above? This is another good place to collect application-related search data. Of course, Google's lead in applied search is not surprising – search is, after all, its forte.

The Android platform is a tempting prospect

However, today's app market is not about who can provide a better index, but who can make money from it, who gets more market share, which developers are more successful, and so on. Constantly perfecting the App Store search is a visionary thinker's "game"-a game that is more relevant to the size of the App store when it grows to the Internet.

At the same time, Google did not speed up the pace of its application platform in order to drum up developers ' pockets. On the contrary, Google's mobile strategy has so far focused mainly on competition for market share. Mobile app developers are contributing more to the iOS platform's revenue, even in smaller Amazon apps.

But given the huge market share of the Android platform, developers already successful on the iOS platform have no choice but to squeeze into the Android app market in order to open up new revenue streams. MOBILEDEVHQ rival Searchman CEO Nillen Shiro (Niren Hiro) said: "Android Market is too big, so many application developers covet, the 2013 application market will be launched around this platform." ”

With more developers targeting the Android Market, Searchman recently began providing an index of Android search results. For these developers, Android has become the second most important application market after iOS. That means Google stores may not be able to deliver high-quality, up-to-date apps as quickly as Apple does, but the app will eventually land on the Android platform.

Apple faces bigger challenges

For Android users, this is like a game of waiting. In a market that has a 70多万款 application and a growing number of applications every day, the question of "Where to publish first" is meaningless and less important than "where there is a Bai Wan application to choose". If the next Instagram app doesn't land on the Android platform, users can still find other apps to pass the time.

The value of applied search is precisely the same: let these people connect with the applications they are interested in. In the process, it would be crucial to recommend the best apps to a particular user, especially for Google, which may not be able to launch the latest and most innovative apps as quickly as Apple does. Google, on the other hand, has to provide users with relevant apps so they don't get bored in the waiting process.

Apple can still claim to be "the first to log on to the iOS platform," "Support only the iOS platform," or even not to apply for discounts. But compared with Google, Apple may be struggling in the field of application search, and the pace of innovation is slower, after all, it has not been involved in this area for a long time. As a result, application developers may try to improve their rankings by ASO (that is, by applying store optimization) before Apple has mastered the relevant technology.

Appnique, MOBILEDEVHQ, Searchman and other companies offer this ASO service, they will study keywords, titles, descriptions, and so on, and then make recommendations, so that developers take steps to upgrade in the application store rankings, thereby maintaining competitiveness. But the problem is that the application of the search "mismatch" is very detrimental to the user experience, and as the number of applications more and more, the difficulty of the search will become more and more.

Once hundreds of thousands of app developers start playing "Aso games," Google and its strengths as engineers with years of SEO experience are clear on how to keep high-quality search results in front of them and put useless results behind them. Apple, by contrast, offers the service mainly by acquiring Chomp, which lags far behind Google in the battle.

In the future, Apple will face even greater challenges in the application search field, especially since it has made significant adjustments to the iOS 6 App Store stores, abandoning previous catalog-based search results and forcing users to turn to their unfamiliar search methods. This approach requires Apple to quickly get the right search results, but so far Apple has not been able to achieve this goal.

Lack of transparency in search algorithms

However, Hiro believes Third-party developers still have the opportunity to find a way to do business in the App store, such as social-networking giant Facebook or a start-up that provides just, data-driven "Yelp/zagat apps." But Apple and Google lack transparency in the mechanisms that apply search algorithms.

"In the Internet SEO World, Google Analytics (Google analytic) and Google's public interpretation of page rankings and algorithm updates will play an important role in helping millions of webmasters find ways to grow on Google's platform," says Hiro. However, in the App Store algorithm, Apple and Google are less transparent about the reasons for competition, historical secrecy and recent privacy-related regulatory risks. Lack of transparency and difficulties in publishing can have a negative impact. ”

Facebook's record in this regard is equally hard to compliment: "We've seen a lot of developers leave the Facebook platform because of the vague application release policy and the hope that startups are losing their second Zynga," says Hiro. ”

Will this bring any more dire results, especially for Apple? The answer is that, at some point in the future, it will be no longer important for high quality applications to take the lead on the Apple ecosystem, because the application is everywhere, and users are more concerned about how many high quality applications can be installed by then, 25? 50? 300? or more?

Google also knows how to do "good enough". In the long run, the most important thing is that when users start looking for a certain type of application, they can find the best of these apps in the location where the application store search results are highest. In this regard, Google is also very adept, and Apple has a long way to go.