The App Store search of Apple has experienced considerable issues yesterday morning, which if not solved as soon as possible might start affecting the sales of app developers.
People have found that the keyword searches are not providing the correct list of apps, and are not able to pull up the searched apps by name. This happens even for popular brands such as Spotify, Tumblr, Uber, Candy Crush, Google and YouTube among others.
A number of users of Twitter and Reddit first noticed the problem. The problem is now being covered by 9to5Mac and MacRumors, two Apple-watching blog sites.
It can be proven by conducting a search for a popular app such as "Tweetbot," a Twitter client. If this is searched by its name, it won't appear in the search results.
Or, one could search for a particular genre of app such as "rss reader," and the search will return incorrect results as well. In this particular case, the search will leave out several top RSS reader apps such as Feedbin, Reeder, NewsBlur, Feedly among others.
It appears that Apple experiences this kind of glitches from time to time. A report that came out in 2010 almost said the same thing about the company.
"Google is copying Apple, but the App Store is broken. I can't believe that after 2 years of existence Apple still hasn't fixed many of the issues that affected the App Store back in 2008. In fact, they added even more," said the report.
Apart from the search problems, the links at the App Store are not resolving in a number of instances. This was noted by the "Dashy Crashy" game developer yesterday morning.
Specifically, the URL that starts with "appstore.com/" followed by the app name (i.e. appstore.com/dashycrashy) do not direct the user to the concerned app. Instead, a blank web page will pop up that shows the error message "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable."
