The Leadership Letter

Real correspondence from the people running real companies — and what it reveals about leadership.

Anonymous Developer Emails Tim Cook Over App Store Search Fairness

A small developer's 2015 complaint to Apple's CEO — later surfaced in federal antitrust litigation — captures the moment independent creators began to feel systematically squeezed out of the marketplace Apple had built around them.

I do not want to take too much of your time, but can you please help to fix the app store search rankings? I have been a developer on the app store from the very beginning and working on my current main app since the launch of the original iPad. I have had a good amount of success on the store and it has allowed me to provide a living for me and my partner while he is in school. For the past year and a half it has been a lot harder to have success — specifically over the past 3 months the search rankings have changed so much my app's position has been all over the place. I used to have over 4,000 downloads a day on average; now recently it has been well under half that each day. I have noticed my app getting pushed down by other apps that receive less downloads per day, have a lower rating, or have not been updated in over a year. I work hard to make sure my app is optimized for the latest hardware, but apps that are not optimized for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus push me down in rankings. I also often get pushed down by apps that have nothing to do with the keyword search term. I feel like the app store now is not helping individual developers like it used to and is only allowing the big guys to play.

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Court Exhibit
Epic Games, Inc. v. Apple Inc.
4:20-cv-05640 (CAND), Doc. 287-14, filed 2021-01-25
August 23, 2015
Public domain
View the primary source →