From what we can see, the number of downloads is now a more dominant factor in rank order. Searching for "wedding" a lot of PlayFirst games show up ahead of actual wedding apps because they cross-promote Wedding Dash. Meanwhile WeddingHappy, our wedding planning app, is down to number 74 and downloads have decreased 30%, even though we fare better with more specific search terms.
This makes it much more difficult for new entrants to get into the market without established apps to cross-promote them, and for small developers to stay afloat with a handful of niche apps.
Cross-promotion should be banned. I hate wanting to read an app's description and being shoved quotes, update logs, developer comments, cross-promotion and other crap.
Yes, I really miss being able to search for new.york or los.angeles, for example. Those terms used to be equivalent to "new york" or "los angeles", but now they are equivalent to the phrases without quotes. I.e. the words no longer have to be next to each other.
Also, requiring the quotes is really painful on a mobile browser keyboard.
Apple changed/clarified its policy to allow VMs and scripting languages, so long as all the bytecode or script is built into the app you submit for approval. Adding more script after the app is installed on the device is not allowed except for the built-in WebKit Javascript engine.
