This article is more than 1 year old

App Store ratings mess: What do we like? Sigh, we dunno – fanbois

How do I know what to download if I don't know what everyone else is doing?

Apple's App Store has continued to display the odd glitch four days after it suspended all rankings for eight hours on Friday to allow for the smooth introduction of iOS 7.

The problem lies with the rankings, which detail the most downloaded apps at any given time. These were frozen on Friday during the launch of the latest models of iPhone, but apparently on some parts of the system they have not yet been fixed.

Currently, the charts on Apple's iTunes Store are broken in Britain, the US, Japan and much of Europe. Instead of the usual list of apps, a message is shown which says: "An error occurred while processing this directive." Apple has also added a few extra categories into the App Store, including the Kids subsection under Games.

Fanbois in Luxembourg and Australia are not affected.

The correct rankings appear to be displayed on the iOS App Store application, however. Meanwhile, accessing the store through the iPhone's browser sees some unusual apps at the top of the charts.

Mobile marketing consultancy Fiksu reportedly sent an email to its customers warning them of an app store outage. Earlier this year, the firm claimed that Apple was quietly incorporating App Store ratings into its rankings, which up to now have been governed solely by an app's popularity (i.e. the number of times it is downloaded). We'll leave you to judge whether or not this is a good thing.

Apple froze its rankings for about eight hours on Friday, possibly to allow the introduction of new features, though it could also have been down to bandwidth concerns or some new tweaks to its selection algorithms.

We know that there were some problems with the launch of iOS7 on Wednesday, with many users unable to upgrade their phones and others experiencing cripplingly slow speeds. To be fair to the fruity firm, iOS 7 was downloaded at such a rate that it became the "the fastest software upgrade in history", according to Apple. It's little wonder there were a few slip-ups along the way.

The Register contacted Apple but have yet to receive a reply. ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like