Does Apple tip the scales in favour of its own apps?
Its products’ consistently high ranking has consumers and consultants skeptical
If you opened the App Store on an iPhone recently and typed “music” in the search box, the first result would have been Apple’s iTunes.
The next would have been Apple Music. Then several more from the company, including some not related to music at all, like iMovie. On some days, you would have had to scroll through as many as eight Apple apps before finding one made by a different publisher.
This, according to Apple, was how the App Store was supposed to work. And that, critics say, is the problem.
Top spots in App Store search results are some of the most fought-over real estate in the online economy. The store generated more than $50 billion (U.S.) in sales last year and the company said two-thirds of app downloads started with a search.
But, as Apple has become one of the largest competitors on a platform that it controls, suspicions that the company has been tipping the scales in its own favour are at the heart of antitrust complaints in the United States, Europe and Russia.
Apple’s apps have ranked first recently for at least 700 search terms in the store, according to a New York Times analysis of six years of search results compiled by Sensor Tower, an app analytics firm. Some searches produced as many as 14 Apple apps before showing results from rivals, the analysis showed. (Though competitors could pay Apple to
place ads above the Apple results.)
Presented with the results of the analysis, two senior Apple executives acknowledged in a recent interview that, for more than a year, the top results of many common searches in the iPhone App Store were packed with the company’s own apps. That was the case even when the Apple apps were less relevant and less popular than ones from its competitors. The executives said the company had since adjusted the algorithm so that fewer of its own apps appeared at the top of search results. The Times’ analysis of App Store data — which included rankings of more than 1,800 apps across 13 keywords since 2013 — illustrated the influence as well as the opacity of the algorithms that underpin tech companies’ platforms.
Those algorithms can help decide which apps are installed, which articles are read and which products are bought. But Apple and other tech giants like Facebook and Google will not explain in detail how such algorithms work — even when they blame the algorithm for problems.
Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice-president who oversees the App Store, and Eddy Cue, the senior vice-president who oversees many of the Apple apps that benefited from the results, said there was nothing underhanded about the algorithm the company had built to display search results in the store.
The executives said the company did not manually alter search results to benefit itself. Instead, they said, Apple apps generally rank higher than competitors because of their popularity and because their generic names are often a close match to broad search terms.
“There’s nothing about the way we run search in the App Store that’s designed or intended to drive Apple’s downloads of our own apps,” Schiller said. “We’ll present results based on what we think the user wants.”
The company is facing the most direct legal challenge in the United States to the clout it has built up through its App Store. In May, the Supreme Court voted 5-4 to allow an antitrust class action against Apple to move forward, saying consumers should be allowed to try to prove that the technology giant had used monopoly power to raise the prices of iPhone apps.
When multiple Apple apps packed the search results, such as in searches for “music,” the Apple executives attributed the results to a feature of the App Store search engine that sometimes grouped apps by maker. They tweaked that feature in July so Apple apps would no longer look as if they were receiving special treatment. Many Apple apps dropped as a result. Several consultants who study the App Store algorithm to help companies rank higher said Apple’s consistent success in the marketplace was suspicious. Algorithms are automated systems designed to largely run on their own. But it is humans who decide what algorithms measure. And those decisions can be subjective.
“I find it hard to believe that organically there are certain Apple apps that rank better than higher-reviewed, more downloaded competitors,” said Todd Dunham, chief executive of the ASO Project, which consults app makers on how to rank higher in the results.
Some of the search results found in The Times’ analysis appeared “steered,” said Eric Enge, an App Store consultant for Perficient, a consulting firm. “It’s no question that the app universe is one of the major battlegrounds out there, and there’s just a ton to be gained commercially by dominating.”