Previously when a developer updates an application, the updated app used to show up in the main category page in iTunes. This meant better visibility to the updated application which resulted in good spike in sales whenever an update is rolled out. These spikes in sales during the updates was the key motivation for developers to keep pushing out updates and to keep improving the apps.
With this new ‘upgrade’, newly updated applications don’t show up in iTunes category page. This means, when a developer updates an application, the update will be pushed directly to existing users and that’s pretty much it. There is no way for new users to know about those newly added features/improvements. Apple killed the key motivation for developers to improve apps, which I think is a BIG mistake.
Hey, Apple!
This.Is.A.Huge.Mistake.
#1
That's what Techslacker said 9 months ago:
We’ll just see developers do what the Tweetie developer did with Tweetie 2 and release upgrades as separate products.
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#2
That's what Kostas said 9 months ago:
On the other hand, we won’t have minor x.x.1 updates clogging the category charts for no reason at all.
I believe Apple did this to prevent abuse of the "updates = visibility" feature/bug of the AppStore.
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