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[Selmak75]

After finally updating my iPhone to iOS 6, i noticed something rather disturbing...

There is no "New releases" button anymore which means that if your app is not in the "New & Noteworthy" then you're out of luck! Your app will NEVER appear in any lists unless a search is performed.

See this article : http://www.develop-online.net/news/42065/The-iOS-6-App-Store-is-a-disaster-for-developers

As an indie developer, in my opinion it is now a big waste of time developing for iOS. It would require massive marketing in order for people to find your apps with a search. I wish i could say that it will come back to bite them in the arse but hardly, only the highly successful apps are listed on top. One could wonder if it was done on purpose just to step on smaller devs.

I thought you all should know before deciding whether or not you want to develop apps on that platform.

Cheers!

Steve

[bjadams]

Apple has been moving towards this direction since quite some time now.

The overall strategy seems to be to cut out the small one man games. Maybe they are way too overloaded with submittions and want to keep around the bigger players.

As someone who invested almost 4 years in building my own game framework for ios I simply can't just quit ios!

[Selmak75]

Developers aren't the only ones affected by this. As a user, i was looking forward in browsing for new releases everyday but now we don't have the option anymore. The only thing that i like about the new iOS apps store app is when you view the app details, that part they did right.

One thing that i remember noticing when i was able to browse the new releases is that they were a lot of stuff that shouldn't be there.

For example, one day i saw 3 versions (all 1.0) of the same app released on the same day. They all had the same and only screenshot and their prices were beyond ridiculous, they seemed completely bogus. I was wondering if it were some kind of money laundering scheme, i mean a screenshot that doesn't even match the app description and one of their version was at least $25. As a result, we (users & developers) are all being punished for things like that.

Fortunately for us, we stopped developing for iOS in December 2011 so it didn't really affect us in that regard. Even before iOS6, it was still difficult to get noticed given there were over 400,000 apps at the time and the new releases section was a vital part to get noticed, even if it was for a day or so.

I'm not sure if the MAC app store is the same, but you could no doubt bring your existing framework on that platform. If i had that much invested like you do, i'd probably give it a try but i have no experience at all with Mac desktop apps so i'm not sure how difficult it would be.

Those using game engines like Unity are more fortunate with the possibility of deployment on multiple platforms at once. But for me, i don't like using game engines, i prefer to do my own stuff and granted, it takes a lot longer to release something unless you have an existing framework like you do =)

Best of luck to you!

[Gregg Williams]

Itunes and the Mac App Store both still have by release date for categories, but yeah the device's store no longer has it which is a pretty big blow, since it seems a ton of IOS purchases are done via device.

Unfortunately this really does hurt your chances of springing into one of the initial top 100 categories and gaining visibility and momentum.

Having multiple apps/games, and cross promoting from within each other becomes more and more important. 

[bjadams]

That's my current target right now, bring out as many good small projects as possible, as Volume is important too.

Finding good artists willing to collaborate seems to be the hardest challenge these days