Study Finds Download Volume May Impact App Store Search Results

New research released today from mobile app marketer Fiksu examines the impact that download volume has on search results in the iTunes App Store.

Today, the App Store has over a million applications available, which means, more than ever, app discovery is being fueled by search as opposed to lists and top charts. Developers now need to know not only how to increase their App Store ranking, but also their search result position, so that their apps are returned first when users type in a query referencing a particular keyword or phrase.

Search results are generally understood to be calculated by three key metrics: the company name, an app’s title, and the 100-character meta-keywords provided within iTunes Connect by the app’s publisher. But Fiksu says it found that download volume, as measured by Category rankings, appears to also have a strong impact on search results ranking.

App Store search today still leaves a lot of room for improvement. The results sometimes fail to showcase the better-known, more recently buzzed about apps in the top results (as when Facebook Paper first launched), while other times results for nearly identical phrases are mind-bogglingly different.

Fiksu wanted to figure how if “popularity” as determined by download volume was having any impact on search results, so it began testing App Store search following the removal of the viral hit Flappy Bird from iTunes. Every day after Flappy Bird’s disappearance, Fiksu ran a search for the phrase “flappy bird” and then matched the results to the app’s then-current overall chart rankings. These chart rankings are based on recent download volume, among other things.

When averaged out, the data indicated, not all that surprisingly, that search result rank and overall rank were closely related. That is, the No. 1 search result would also have the highest overall rank (usually No. 1 overall), and the others were ordered by descending overall rank. In other words, Apple gives apps a bump in search when their recent download volume increases, it seems.

However, there’s still some sort of secret sauce that hasn’t been quite figured out because, while the above data is based on averages, there were occasionally instances where a No. 5 search result would be the No. 1 or No. 2 app in the store, or when a No. 1 overall rank wasn’t the top search result.

Fiksu looked to see if an app’s average rating was having an impact, but those results were inconclusive. (The apps all had similar ratings, though – 3.50-4.50 – so that could have been an issue).

In addition, the company noticed that search ranks were more volatile than the charts, with 22 apps showing up in the top 10 search results over the course of the two weeks. In order to make sure that the volatility wasn’t just a “Flappy Bird” thing, so to speak, the company also ran searches for the term “game” and found a similar pattern.

While these initial experiments seem to indicate there’s at least a correlation between download volume and search ranking, they can’t definitively prove that the algorithm works this way, especially as it’s still unclear how much weight other factors carry, like the app’s name, keywords, or metrics like historical downloads or average ratings.*

What can be said for sure, however, is that an app’s search position will matter more as the store grows in size, and as queries become increasingly sophisticated thanks to recent App Store improvements, like the newly added related search suggestions, for example, and other changes yet to come.

* Update: Ian Sefferman, CEO at MobileDevHQ, says he has found a high correlation between the percentage of the reviews which include a keyword and search rankings, as well as a high correlation between average rating and search rankings:

5-Year Old Kid Finds A Security Exploit On The Xbox One, Gets A Researcher Credit

I thought I was a pretty clever kid when I was 5. Other kids ate boogers; I didn’t. Do you know how many gold stars I had? All the gold stars.

One thing I didn’t have, though: an acknowledgement from Microsoft for finding a security vulnerability. This kid does.

In a story that is surely making someone’s day pretty crappy over at Microsoft HQ, a 5-year old kid reportedly figured out how to bypass the account restrictions meant to keep him off of his Dad’s Xbox One.

The trick? When asked for a password, he pounded the space bar a bunch of times, then hit enter. For some crazy reason, this… worked. Repeatedly.

Late April Fool’s joke? Doesn’t seem like it. Word of Kristoffer’s 1337-ness comes from ABC10 news down in LA, who notes that Microsoft took the bug seriously enough to give Kristoffer a security researcher credit after the bug was patched.

Sure enough, a quick glance at Microsoft’s security acknowledgements for March lists one Kristoffer Wilhelm von Hassel. He’s one of few individuals on the page whose name doesn’t link to a Twitter account, since he’s… you know, too young to have a Twitter account.

Sure, it’s not like the kid found some buffer overflow that let him execute remote code and turn the Xbox into a toaster or whatever. But he tried something, and it worked, and he knew he’d done something he wasn’t supposed to — enough so to admit he felt a bit nervous about the whole thing. This kid is awesome.

Remember to put this one on the ol’ college application when the time comes, Kristoffer. Pretty sure “Acknowledged by Microsoft as a security researcher at the age of 5″ would open a door or ten.

[via ABC10News]

China’s iOS Usage Spiked With New iPhones, But Increase Driven By Older Models, Mixpanel Finds

A new report about the state of iOS usage in China from mobile analytics firm Mixpanel reveals a lot of interesting info about how one of Apple’s most important international markets is adopting its mobile OS. The good news is that iOS usage overall is rising quickly, especially over the past year – but that increase in usage isn’t necessarily coming from the sale of brand new hardware.

The iPhone 5s and 5c launched in China in September last year, for the first time simultaneous with the North American launch. Mixpanel saw a considerable uptick in iOS usage in the country begin at that time, but the most growth came from the iPhone 5, not the newer devices. This is likely because the 5 became a lot cheaper as soon as new hardware was made official, which is backed up by the fact that once again, when China Mobile unveiled its iPhone 5s and 5c launch in January of this year, there was a growth spike attributable mostly to the iPhone 5.

Mixpanel says the takeaway is that Apple manages to increase interest in its platform overall with launches in China, and not necessarily to the device(s) which are actually new to the launch itself. But it could also suggest that price sensitivity in these markets is a very real concern, and one that might result in a lot of new device sales if Apple actually ventured into the lower cost device market (the iPhone 5c, while spun by some as that, actually didn’t drive Apple’s usual pricing down compared to past launches).

The traffic- and engagement-tracking startup also analyzed usage distribution in China, and found that iOS devices were used over a large portion of the country, with over 40 percent of its data coming from 783 cities. Major metropolitan areas understandably generated the most usage, which Mixpanel says is due to network coverage as well as average income.

What’s interesting is that high GDP isn’t strictly tied to greater usage – Tianjin has the highest GDP in the region, but only sends 2.5 percent of China’s iOS data through Mixpanel’s product, for instance. Nor does population tie directly to higher use; Shanghai and Beijing are neck and neck in population and iOS usage, but Guangdong (which has three times the population and houses Shenzen) has almost the same iOS usage, pointing once again to income as a moderating factor.

For more about this unique look behind the curtain at iOS activity in China, check out Mixpanel’s full blog post detailing the report.

Mt.Gox Finds 200,000 Bitcoin In An “Old-Format” Digital Wallet

Mt.Gox, the bankrupt online currency exchange, said that it has located 200,000 bitcoin in a digital wallet. In a filing, CEO Mark Karpeles disclosed that the currency, which is worth about $118 million at current exchange rates, was discovered in one of the “old-format wallets” that Mt.Gox had used in the past and assumed no longer held any bitcoins.

The wallets were rescanned after Mt.Gox applied for a civil rehabilitation procedure in Tokyo District Court earlier this month. After the 200,000 bitcoin were discovered, Mt.Gox then moved them to offline wallets. As Coindesk notes, this happened around the time large amounts of bitcoin handled by Mt.Gox that had previously been dormant started moving on the block chain.

The recovered 200,000 bitcoin brings Mt.Gox’s total loss down to 650,000 bitcoin, but that doesn’t help the exchange’s customers, who are not considered creditors and therefore won’t receive any repayments if Mt.Gox decides to sell assets. As Fortune notes, the only way for most Mt.Gox customers who lost bitcoin to regain any of their money is to file a lawsuit.