Android Market Search is broken...for developers

4 points

15 years ago

for the last few months the Android Market search facility has been broken. When you search for an app why name/description you are shown the number of possible results (usually in the thousands) but when you scroll down you are only ever allowed to see about 20 results. eg: search for ringtones it shows 25479 results but only the top 20 are ever shown in the results list.

Google have listed this error as a known bug and have it up on their "known issues" page (http://www.google.com/support/androidmarket/bin/static.py?page=known_issues.cs) but it's not fixed in the latest version of the market (from your article: http://www.engadget.com/2011/11/01/android-market-v3-3-11-apk-now-available-adds-auto-update-by-de/) and has been evident for months - at least since August (http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Android+Market/thread?tid=0fe7684aaf99d3cc&hl=en)

The issue here is that it's really hurting app developers - unless you're being favoured by Google and have your app featured, or is a top selling app it's very difficult to be found anywhere on the market. This hurts new, smaller developers who have no way of making their new app visible, unless they're willing to fork out a healthy chunk of change to get their app advertised - usually forked over to Google themselves via their Ad network purchase Admob. I'm not saying these facts are related just very aware that this is a problem which needs to be fixed.

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