Apple’s App Store has been returning improper search results to user queries since early May 5 as Apple works to find a fix for the glitch.
Apple has acknowledged a problem on its system status Webpage, which states that the App Store “service is not working as expected for all users,” and is accompanied by a yellow problem indicator flag.
The company did not immediately respond to an eWEEK inquiry asking about the nature and scope of the problem affecting the App Store.
Reports about the App Store problems began surfacing on Twitter and other social media platforms about 5 a.m. EDT, as users posted their experiences about odd behavior with the site’s search engine as they perused to locate apps.
One of the first posts on Twitter about the glitch came from Miguel Díez Ferreira, who wrote, “The search engine of the @AppStore is broken.”
Another user, Matt Davenport, asked in his post if others were having issues with the service. “Is the app store search broken for anyone else?” he wrote. “A lot of big names missing, Instagram, Tweetbot, Candy Crush, etc.,” that were not showing up in searches of the store.
Jen Sun Smith, also couldn’t find what she was looking for when she tried the store. “Is the @AppStore search broken?” she wrote.
App searches on the site are not always displaying the proper apps in response to search terms, giving users inadequate app choices based on their queries.
The problems also might be affecting the Mac App Store and iTunes, according to a May 5 story by TechnoBuffalo.
Glitches and outages obviously can’t be prevented 100 percent of the time, but for popular sites such as the App Store, any issues or service interruptions tend to get plenty of user and media response due to their heavy use. And the App Store has certainly been the subject of reports from frustrated users in the past, according to a search of Twitter posts.
Back on Feb. 4, user Daniel Saidi posted, “The App Store is behaving really [strangely]. Search indexing seems broken—it finds an app, then [doesn’t]. Anyone else experiencing this?”
His report is perhaps similar to the problems that are currently being experienced by users.
Other user complaints on social media sites typically comment about the inadequacy of the search capabilities for the App Store, which they say often doesn’t easily find apps for users. Developers have also posted complaints, stating that their apps can’t easily be located using the existing search tools in the App Store.
Apple’s App Store over the last few years consistently brings in much higher revenue around the world than Google’s Play sore, while Google’s Play store continues to rake in far more downloads by users, according to previous eWEEK stories.