Given that Apple doesn’t comment on rumours, take Bloomberg’s story Apple Pursues New Search Features for a Crowded App Store with a pinch of salt. The claim is that Apple has

constructed a secret team to explore changes to the App Store, including a new strategy for charging developers to have their apps more prominently displayed

For me, the key paragraph in the story is this:

If Apple goes through with the idea, “it’s going to be huge,” said Krishna Subramanian, the co-founder of Captiv8, which helps brands market using social media. “Anything that you can do to help drive more awareness to your app, to get organic downloads, is critical.”

Subramanian is right in one sense: if Apple does this, it will be huge. It’ll be huge in eradicating any sense that the App Store is a meritocracy when it comes to app visibility.

Right now, search remains a mess, in part due to its lack of granularity regarding fields to search within. It has improved — a search for ‘Twitter’ now first returns a selection of Twitter clients rather than random apps with teams who were very good at App Store SEO — but it could be better.

My bigger concern, though, is paid placement permeating throughout the store, such as on to the entry pages a great many people use to find new apps and games. There, Apple’s ‘curation’ is uneven. I’ve been told by various American friends that ‘Editor’s Choice’ in the US is closer in meaning to ‘this is interesting’ than ‘this is amazing’, but even so, that slot is often filled with garbage, albeit garbage released by companies important to Apple from a revenue standpoint.

However, it would be hyperbole to suggest this is ubiquitous. In both apps and games, prominent positions in the App Store are very regularly given to top-notch products, many of which are by indies; Apple’s selections are on the whole pretty good. A case in point: today’s App Store highlights for games include Warbits, PKTBALL, and Chameleon Run, all of which are very much worth playing. And the first couple of entries in the smaller ‘What We’re Playing’ zone are Looty Dungeon and Shadow Bug — both of which I’d also recommend.

So should Apple veer down a paid route for search, I hope it won’t spread further. Things are hard enough for developers now, without them worrying that they’ll need the deepest of pockets, in order to even have a shot of visibility on the App Store.