Where am I?

AlbumMixer 1.6 is coming to an iOS device near you. This release works around a problem with the playlist query API in iOS 4.0 – thanks to Ray for the problem report and the debugging help. I also added new settings to adjust the playback volume (Kelly?) and disable use of Album Artist when filtering by playlist.

This release continues to do album shuffle on the iphone (and touch). New in this release are an auto-shuffle option, an option to disable “shake to shuffle”, a nicer icon, some bug fixes, and separate screens for the settings and filters.

AlbumMixer 1.2 is now available. This update includes features that users have requested: a “next album” button, and the genre-based shuffle, and playlist-based shuffle. The UI is also much nicer, IMO. And the basic album shuffle still works, too.

Besides all that, this update includes a change in the official app name to “AlbumMixer – Shuffle by Album”. Just a few minutes after that change went live, app store searches for “album shuffle” began to show AlbumMixer as the third match (finally!). So there’s a lesson here for iPhone developers: if your keywords might be confused with an existing app, embed them in your application name.

Apple finally responded to one of my numerous iTunes Connect inquiries. I keep asking them why AlbumMixer, despite having keywords “album,shuffle” can’t be found by searching for “album shuffle” in the app store. Until now I’ve heard no response whatsoever.

But today there was a reply via email in my inbox: “If you do not see a resolution within 3 business days, please let us know.” Apparently they’re responding to my most recent inquiry, of 26 September. I wonder if that means all my previous messages were lost? Or ignored? Or are they just being terse?

Today’s search for “album shuffle” still doesn’t match my app. I’ll give them until 2 October, as requested (that’s really a full week from my latest report, and close to four weeks since I first reported the problem). In the meantime maybe they’ll approve AlbumMixer 1.2: I’m still hoping that changing the app store name to “Album Mixer – Shuffle by Album” will fix the problem. Either way is fine with me: I have this crazy idea that there are lots of iPhone users out there who want album shuffle, and it’s frustrating to think that they can’t find my app.

AlbumMixer 1.0 has been doing reasonably well – especially considering that Apple still hasn’t indexed the keywords, or responded to my inquiries via iTunes Connect. But the feedback from users has been good, and I’ve fixed a couple of bugs in the new 1.1 release. The release after that, 1.2, will add some fun new features.

Did I mention that the keywords I supplied aren’t searchable? The 1.0 keywords were “iPod,album,shuffle,album shuffle,music”. But searching for “album shuffle” wouldn’t match my app. Searching for “album mixer” would, which implies that Apple is doing some word-splitting on app names – interesting. I was worried about the reference to “iPod”, so for 1.1 I changed the keywords to “album,shuffle,random,music”. The description isn’t supposed to be searchable, but I removed “iPod” from that too. That did something: a few hours after 1.1 went live I was able to find it using “random album”.

But searching for “album shuffle” still doesn’t work. I suspect that Apple is silently ignoring keywords that match existing app names: there’s a “Shuffle” and a “Shuffle!” in the app store. So in 1.2 I’m trying to change the app store name to “Album Mixer – Shuffle by Album”, while leaving the display name alone so that it fits on the Springboard icon. I hope that will get the term “shuffle” through the hypothetical keyword filter. We shall see.

Given the lack of app store search keywords, I think most of my traffic so far has been coming from Apple’s discussion forums (and Google searches matching those forums). I’ve been collecting threads there, and posting to them when possible. In no particular order….

• http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=10258118
• http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=10258114
• http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=10195656
• http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=10195574
• http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=10195570
• http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=10195651

I also posted a reply to this question.