Apple has a secret team dedicated to make radical changes to its App Store.
According to Bloomberg, Apple is exploring to adapt a Google-like model, a paid search result in which will allow developers to pay for their apps to appear in a certain search result in the App Store. For instance, if a developer is looking to market a navigation app, would then pay for their app to be listed above or among popular titles such as Google Maps, when a user searches for maps.
Apparently the company assembled a 100 people in the new team dedicated to work on the feature, including former engineers from Apple's iAd team. The team will be headed by Apple Vice President Todd Teresi, who has also led Apple's iAd ad business until CEO Tim Cook phased it out.
Co-founder of Captiv8 Krishna Subramanian said, "It's going to be huge. Anything that you can do to help drive more awareness to your app, to get organic downloads, is critical."
For developers to be featured on the homepage of the App Store has shown to be effective in generating trends and income.
This could also show a significant move for Apple to earn a lot more money off its App Store that has been known as an important asset in creating platform stickiness. Today, Apple receives a cut out of the money developers make off app sales, in-app purchases and advertising. But if Apple goes through with a paid search result to its developers, could set off a whole new stream of revenue from the App Store.
In December, CEO Tim Cook emphasized the importance of the App Store by shuffling executive oversight to split out iTunes chief Eddy Cue and assigned them to SVP of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller as a perfect candidate to build out the ecosystem and was also in charge of almost all the operations in developing Apple.
