iTunes AppStore Update - The Rich Get Richer... and the rest?

The latest iTunes update speaks volumes about Apple's view of the AppStore and it's publishers - You either "Have It" or "You Don't".  The change has moved the search abilities into a Black and White mode by removing a valuable "Shades of Grey" feature.

Many people will have already noticed the update to the iTunes AppStore - especially the new category of "Top Grossing".  As any developer will tell you, application discovery by the consumer is the key in making any money from their app. That is why getting into "Featured" or becoming "Top Selling" or in the "Top 25" is so important - they give the best chance of becoming self-fullfilling once achieved.

Take for example, I might be interested in buying an application to check my Horoscope. In the previous version of iTunes, I could do a search on "Horoscope" and I would have been presented a list of apps/songs/podcasts which I could order by popularity.  I would then see how some apps would rise to the top and I could easily see the second, third, etc choices to also explore.






Now in the latest version of iTunes, I just get a collection of icons, in this case almost 70, giving me as the only two decision choices how well I like the name of the product and how interesting the icon is.

It's yet to be determined if this will increase or decrease the number of application "detail pages" consumers will explore before making their choice.  This makes the buying experience more prone to Apple Style marketing - where the purchase experience is based on how well one can polish an image and present pretty pictures and prose.  With close to 70,000 apps in the AppStore to explore, we've now lost a significant factor in smart purchasing and differentiation.