

Apple Debuts New AppStore.com Vanity URLs For Developers During Super Bowl - iProject
http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/03/apple-debuts-new-vanity-urls-for-app-store-developers-during-super-bowl-domain-name-land-grab-to-follow/

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ajg1977
The article is a little misleading in that it suggests a land-grab. The short
links are auto-generated from app names/company names by pruning whitespace,
copyright/trademark symbols and so on.

So if your app wasn't already called "Banking", you're not going to get
appstore.com/banking.

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MaxGabriel
Now that this exists, it feels to me like it obviously always should have been
there. Hopefully this will improve app discoverability for developers, and
help make up for deficiencies in App Store search.

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hnriot
I don't see how it will change anything. Search is broken at an algorithmic
level, and switching from iTunes.com to AppStore.com really won't help. Much
as I wish it would. Apple needs to either spend some of their cash reserve on
some search engineers or play nice with google, if apple simply used good as
the search engine behind the AppStore it would likely be a win for both
companies. Apple sells more apps, google collects more data. By thinking
small, apple are losing out every time someone tries to find an app, even
using its name, and still the AppStore sometimes can't find it. I know there's
some latency issues when something new comes out (who remembers trying to
search "google maps" when it first launched a few months back only to find it
had not yet reached your search instance), it beyond latency search in the
AppStore needs a major overhaul

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nwh
I'm curious how much their search and search interface are costing them. The
App Store iOS application is atrocious; users are more likely to get
frustrated and give up than find the application they were searching for.

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xinsight
I only see redirects to an itunes search.

    
    
      curl -I http://appstore.com/startrekapp
      HTTP/1.1 302 Found
      Server: somethingNice.
      Date: Tue Jun  1 12:48:03 PDT 1999 PDT
      Referer: http://appstore.com/
      Location:   http://search.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZContentLink.woa/wa/link?mt=8&path=apps%2fstartrekapp
      Content-type: text/html
      Content-length: 470
    

If you don't launch iTunes, it results in a bland/useless page in the browser.
Lot more work to do before this could be considered a "vanity URL".

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xinsight
Update: If you add "www" to the URL, you get a 404.

I'm having a hard time believing that this is run by Apple. The appear to be
the registrar in the domain records - and the technical note clearly indicates
they control appstore.com

[https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#qa/qa1633/_index.ht...](https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#qa/qa1633/_index.html)

But it seems off-brand for the following reasons:

* requests to the main domain uses an HTML redirect instead of an HTTP redirect (as if they didn't have permissions to configure the webserver properly)

* the webserver name is hidden on normal requests (see above), but visible on 404 requests. The servers are "Apache/2.2.3 (PU_IAS)" and "Apache/2.2.15 (Oracle)"

* the message on a request to appstore.com is infantile (and unstyled) "Bye Bye You shouldn't be here."

Odd.

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nwh
> the message on a request to appstore.com is infantile (and unstyled) "Bye
> Bye You shouldn't be here."

That's ridiculously unprofessional. Every other domain Apple owns redirects to
apple.com/ if you go somewhere you shouldn't.

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vlad
Interesting. I developed App Theme Store last summer at
<http://www.AppThemeStore.com>. I currently have a couple of GitHub-related
themes on it for purchase. I also have another "app" related domain since
2007. I'm sure I'm not the only one besides Amazon who believes the term "app
store" is very generic.

