Last week, Apple’s App Store experienced significant problems with its search functionality, but the impact on the mobile development industry wasn’t immediately apparent. Now a new report from Tune claims that 65 percent of iOS apps saw their daily downloads drop by 10 percent. In addition, 15 percent of apps saw downloads decline by more than 50 percent.
Apps with a lot of organic installs (i.e. apps that receive a lot of installs when users search for them by name) were disproportionately affected by the outage. Some top tier developers lost nearly 2,500 new users due to the problem.
However, some apps also made unexpected gains as a result of the bug. For example, because a search for Spotify was returning SoundCloud, SoundCloud saw a marked increase in downloads for a time.
