[spwa4]

You fail to take into account that both the Apple app store AND the Google Play Store are very far along in enshittifying.

You will never be shown the apps you want. Only the apps that maximally exploit your wallet. There will be attempt after attempt after attempt to make you click the revenue generating apps instead. Do an experiment. Search of "OpenAI ChatGPT" on the App Store and the Play Store.

Play Store: can I just start with making the remark that now even Google has decided allowing for search is wasting money. I mean. At least their search works (as opposed to ...), but obviously they don't want you to search for an app. They also openly deceive their users. The search on the web is very different in results from the on-device search (which is at least easier to find, but works way worse and this just isn't an accident)

Top links the search returns on mobile: "Praktika - AI Language Tutor" "Open Chat - AI bot app" (with an icon very close to ChatGPT), then the actual ChatGPT app, then "ChatOn - AI Chat Bot Assistant" (also with an obviously deceptive icon)

The Apple App Store is the same shit. Obviously Apple is no longer about actually giving users the Apps they want, but the apps that make maximum money for Apple.

[deaux]

In one of the niches I'm in, the top apps that do rank above us are entirely free (we're freemium), so that doesn't entirely track. Your premise holds some merit, but it's not as extreme as you're saying besides extremely saturated fields.

All you're saying is really "app store search is not a viable day 1 strategy for user acquisition". In general you're right! It also has nothing to do with my comment, I didn't "fail to take it into account" because it's completely unrelated to my comment. Which is about this headline also including a significant increase of non-slop, good apps, whereas (at time of writing) this comment section mostly pretends it's all slop.