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Long time top selling iOS app vanished from the App Store. Were we pulled?

13 points by codecamper ↗ HN
Our app, disappeared from the app store rankings. We've been a top 10 News category app (US apple app store) for the past 5 years. Last night the app vanished from the App Store rankings.

I called iTunes Connect support. They said that nothing appeared to be wrong with the app. No flags were present. They said this is normal app store ranking algorithm behavior. (normal to go from top 10 to not in the top 1000 over the course of one day?)

I am trying to determine if we have been pulled from the store. The app still appears when it is searched for.

We have no communication from Apple regarding why our app may have been chosen out to be removed from rankings.

Anyone out there with similar experiences or advice?

Anyone out there ever had their iOS app pulled?

Thank you! Matt

8 comments

[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 33.5 ms ] thread
ShoePooPoo
Will you share the name of it ?
codecamper
Not sure if I should. Apple may not like us developers sharing this sort of behind the scenes sort of information. We were planning to release a new version that's been in development several months soon. Would hate to mess up its chances. This is very frustrating. Mostly because we have just no information at all from Apple.
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missbit
woo hoo a chance for digital sleuthing.

Lets see.. looking at App Annie News category US store, I see Scanner911 Police Radio Pro listed in the top ten going back for a while. And it is gone as of two days ago.

http://goo.gl/Nk35oJ this article from 2009 mentions that Matthew Pease was the author of Scanner911.

Scanner 911 then? Is that you Matthew Pease?

codecamper
Hmm I don't see the point of doing this.

Anyways. We are just trying to find out if anyone else has had this happen.

And when it happened, did the app disappear entirely from just rankings, or entirely.. from rankings & search.

Ours can still be located via search, but not by any ranking.

dev311
We also have a long-time app that recently (within the past 1-2 weeks) completely disappeared from the app store rankings. It used to always be in the top 20 or so of its category, but now it's not ranked at all on the iPad app store. I'm not sure what my actual app ranking is now, but it doesn't show in the top 150 anymore. Like your app, mine can still be found when searching by keyword. On the iPhone app store, my app is still ranked, but lower than it usually is.

My sales haven't changed too much, since I think most find my app through keyword searches, so I don't think a drop in sales is what caused the drop in rank. I was thinking it was a glitch/bug in their algorithm or possibly iPad device sales are so low now that hardly anyone is buying apps of my genre? But it's still really strange that with similar sales, my ranking has completely dropped off the charts like it has on the iPad app store.

dev311
Well, after posting about this just yesterday, my app is now back in the top 20 rankings today. But it had definitely disappeared from the rankings for a good week or so. I guess it was a glitch or maybe related to the downtime Apple had yesterday, and it was fixed when they fixed things.
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