In 2019, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times jointly conducted an extensive survey of the App Store, focusing on Apple’s own apps that clearly and consistently ranked ahead of competitors.At that time, Apple responded that the entire recommendation was carried out by a secret algorithm with 42 different variables in accordance with regulations, and company executives repeatedly emphasized that they would not manually intervene in search results.
access:
Apple Online Store (China)
However, in the Epic Game and Apple trial sessions, an intriguing email chain surfaced: Apple seems to have admitted to manually raising the ranking of its own Files application in order to stay ahead of its competitors for 11 months.
In answer to Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, “Why do Files appear in the first place when searching for Dropbox? Dropbox even[搜索结果]When the question was not visible on the first page of “”, Apple’s head of app search Debankur Naskar replied: “We are canceling manual promotion, and now the search results should be more relevant.”
As you can see, Naskar hinted that Files was deliberately promoted to the exact search result during the “last WWDC” period. That should be WWDC 2017, almost a year ago, when the Files app debuted.
However, this email also expressed the attitude of Apple’s executives. App Store vice president Matt Fischer (Matt Fischer) clearly opposed this approach from the beginning. The email said “Who put the Files app on top of Dropbox in the organic search results? I don’t know we have done this, and I don’t think we should do this.” And he said: “In the future, I hope that any similar requests will be reviewed/approved by me.”
.