The Initial Effect Of iOS 8 Spotlight Search On App Discovery

When we covered WWDC 2014 back in June, we highlighted eight new features of iOS 8 that would be important to app publishers. One of the more interesting improvements was the integration of App Store search results into Spotlight Search.

It was exciting to imagine how much a deeply linked Spotlight Search could contribute to increased visibility for all apps. Now that iOS 8 has been out for awhile, let's find out if Spotlight Search really does help potential users find your app. This post will show you how it currently works in iOS 8.0.2.

iOS 8 Spotlight Search Improvements

With a simple downward swipe on their iOS device, people can easily access the search capability of their iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. Before iOS 8 however, only things on the device were searchable.

Now Apple displays search results from iTunes, the App Store, websites and even movie showtimes. Their hope is that people will start using Spotlight Search instead of opening a browser to do a Google search.

So does this added functionality help people find your app? Here is what we discovered.

The Results

App Names

We started by searching for apps that we were pretty sure would show up in the results. That meant looking for games like Clash of Clans.

The App Store listing appeared after only typing in the word "clash." This looked promising.

Then we started searching for apps the Top Charts. Most of the apps were easy to find, but there were a few that didn't come up right away. For example, the Kik messaging app only came up after typing "app" after the name.

Some apps on the Top Charts didn't come up at all. When we searched for the Kill Shot app (which is currently #6 on the Overall - Free chart), it didn't come up. Then we tried adding "app" to the search and it actually brought up an entirely different app.

We tried to figure out why some apps on the Top Charts appeared in search and others didn't. We examined everything from time since first release, to number of ratings and even looked at the maturity rating of the apps.

There weren't any concrete reasons that we could find to determine if an app would show up in Spotlight Search or not. One would think that a Top Charts ranking would be enough, but apparently that is not the case.

Keywords

Since a search for the Kill Shot app brought up a result for an entirely different app, we decided to look at some keyword searches to see what they turned up. We searched for several common ASO keywords, but our searches didn't turn up anything conclusive.

In fact, many of our searches returned no results. For example, "td" is a popular keyword for tower defense games. But even when we searched for that keyword, Spotlight Search only returned a Wikipedia entry.

Conclusion

At this point, there doesn't seem to be a way to optimize for Spotlight Search. Even searches for the most popular app names and keywords return inconsistent results.

It does help some well established apps. But we need to wait for Apple to refine the algorithm, in order for it to benefit more apps.

Since only one App Store result is displayed at a time, the apps that show up could be manually curated. We will update you as soon as we uncover any additional information.

What have you noticed about the Spotlight Search algorithm? Let us know in the comments below...