Comment by apparent
18 days ago
The search results in the App Store are ridiculous. Sometimes I search for an app by name and have to scroll through dozens of other apps before finding the one I had searched for.
App Store search is as broken as Apple Mail search, if not worse.
Amen. App-store search is an offense sham, wasting users' time and stealing from developers.
And +1 to pitiful Mail search.
But Apple has long suffered from a peculiar learning disability in regard to search. Not only does Finder fail to find files matching search strings that it's showing you IN THE CURRENT DIRECTORY... but both Finder and Spotlight provide no option to include WHERE it found stuff in search results. You can't even add "path" to the result columns as an OPTION. So if it finds a bunch of files with the same name... oh well.
Leave it to Apple to field a search facility that refuses to tell you WHERE it found stuff.
In spotlight search, you can hold down cmd to show the path of the selected file. And cmd + enter will open the containing folder in finder.
Thanks, but the point is to see the locations IN the result list, so you can eliminate hits that you know are irrelevant (like ones on backup volumes that aren't current, or whatever). Having to click on every hit, one at a time, and hold a secret hotkey is not just undiscoverable but absurdly cumbersome.
The Finder issue can be alleviated if you include the path bar in your Finder window, at least it is so before Tahoe. So you highlight a search result and the path bar shows you where it is.
Search on iOS Mail is… what is it doing? I can see the e-mail right there, but Mail can’t find it. Especially if it needs to be « connected to power and on Wi-Fi ». Why?
I’m not sure if this still works as everything gets a bit more broken in every new macOS, but context menu ‘Reveal in Finder’ used to be my way to figure out where the search result was.
My latest macOS gripe is that the ability to copy text out of iTunes (something ridiculous like, say, an album description) has...just disappeared? I’d love to know what UI framework shenanigans just straight up break text selection.
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Thanks, but having to click on every single result one at a time and peer at a path bar somewhere is far from acceptable. This prevents you from sorting results by location, and skipping hits on volumes you know to be irrelevant.
Finder has always been the weakest part of Mac OS for some reason. The one UI that Windows beat them on.
Yes, Finder has always sucked. We were promised a "ground-up rewrite" years ago... don't know what happened there.
Microsoft has degraded Explorer, though. For example, you used to be able tell which directories were empty by simply noting whether there was a + symbol next to them. Clever and time-saving.
Now, not only did MS replace the universally-understood + sign with a stupid triangle, but it now HIDES all the triangles unless you happen to roll the cursor into the left pane. WTF, WHY?
Oh, and if you select multiple files in Explorer and right-click to say "Open with..." NOPE! Microsoft inexplicably removes "open with" if you select multiple files, even files of identical type (PNGs, for example).
The opening of multiple files was fully functional 30 years ago. WTF?
I remember Google got sued for this once. It was something about linking trademarked names to an ad - Google allowed a competitor to display an ad when someone searched for the trademarked name on Google. They lost the case or settled (can't remember). Perhaps someone should test this on Apple too, by trademarking the app name and defending it in court. Since there's precedent, Apple is likely to settle or lose and payout.
Or make 100 the same apps.
You should see what Google has done with the latest version of the Phone app. You used to be able to click on contacts and that would show you.. your contacts. Now it shows recent calls with a search bar for contacts. Say I want to call a friend named Dave. As soon as I start typing, search results begin populating, but none of the names it offers start with "D", they just contain "D" somewhere. It could be the middle of a last name. And I can't figure out why they'd fuck this up. There are no ads to be injected into my attempts to find a contact, so I have to wonder if this is just the beginning of a push to ruin every convenience so users will turn to Gemini for everything.
It's not as bad as you say. If you search in the Phone app, a single letter search returns contacts with a name field (and then a company field, and then a notes field) starting with that letter. It works reasonably well.
The Contacts app is worse and returns anything with a string anywhere in the contact details starting with that letter.
Yeah that was very visible when HBO Max launched here in Austria and Germany. The top result was HBO Max FYC (which by itself is a very bad name, but it's not for normal customers), then came other results with even other streaming services and only after scrolling a bit you got the normal HBO Max app. Didn't matter if you searched for "hbo" or the full name "hbo max".
I was shocked by the App Store yesterday. I was searching for a well known app made by a huge f500 company. Now, this app is by some distance the most used app in its category but they had CHANGED the name of the app to the name of the second largest app of that kind. That’s crazy!
A near fraud from the company and real failure of curation from Apple.
Works as intended.
Makes you scroll past shit with a 0.001% chance you will download it on the way to the app you are really looking for.
> Works as intended
Every single time you read "search is broken" you should parse it as "search has been exhaustively optimised and tuned to maximize revenue for the company providing it".
Search is never broken. It's just not doing what you think it should be doing.
Google and Youtube as well seem to have this problem. I find myself searching with "Quotation marks" a lot.
But Apple must take 30% of your revenue to maintain this level of quality. Don't you know that your parents using an Android would get scam infested phones because having unlocked app distribution prevents this kind of quality experience.
> App Store search is as broken as Apple Mail search, if not worse.
That means App Store search is not broken by malice but by incompetence. Apple just don't know how to implement search.
What they want is the app to pay for ads placement for their own app, to have to out-bid the competition.
what's your problem with mail search? works pretty well for me. it definitely can't beat gmail web search as I remember it from years ago:)
gmail is now such that I don't even understand the inbox.