Just released: Musky Country

PaulH

I've just released Musky Country, a casual fishing game made with Gideros. Musky are gamefish mostly found around the Great Lakes region in North America. They're the largest member of the pike family, and they're notoriously difficult to catch, often following lures right up to the boat. Some famous musky fishing guides are featured in the game, providing advice and commentary.

Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pishtech.muskycountry

Apple App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/musky-country/id1545678709

An HTML5 "light edition" of the game is also embedded within the Musky 360 app.





One issue I'm having, that I've never encountered before, is that on Google Play searching for the exact name of the app (Musky Country) or any phrases in the app description won't find the app. Irrelevant apps that have neither "musky" nor "country" in their names or even descriptions show up.

I found a Google Play support thread with hundreds of people having this issue in the last couple of months, so I suspect they may have broken their search algorithm. Perhaps new apps with few downloads or ratings are getting a zero rank rather than just a low rank, or something like that. Or perhaps it's an issue with their "managed publishing" option, where they review an app but don't publish it until you choose to. I've never used that option on Google Play before launching this app. Or could it be that submitting an app under managed publishing flags the app to keep it out of search results, and that manually publishing isn't clearing it for the search engine like it should?

I'm just guessing at what might be going on, since right now you can only get the Android version if you have the link, or search for the name in quotes, which of course it not how people search app stores. It's promoted in the latest Musky 360 podcast, but most listeners who search for it on Google Play won't find it. Very frustrating...

In any case, the app is live, and at least it's off to a decent start on Apple's app store.

Cheers,

Paul

hgy29

PaulH said:

One issue I'm having, that I've never encountered before, is that on Google Play searching for the exact name of the app (Musky Country) or any phrases in the app description won't find the app. Irrelevant apps that have neither "musky" nor "country" in their names or even descriptions show up.

I faced the same issue with the update my game last week end. But in my case the game already had some history, reviews and a few users a day. I hope it is just a bug on google side, but I fear they just changed their ranking algorithm...

PaulH

I certainly hope it's a bug too, and not an intentional feature of their current search algorithm. I can understand giving already popular apps with related keywords a higher position in search results than a new app, but I can't think of any logical reason they'd exclude an app completely from results for a search for the app's actual name. The app stores have already made it a lot harder than it once was for users to find a new app, but at least searching for it by name always worked before.

Luuny

Yeees, one of the stages of accepting changes is resistance, especially when it is not very convenient.

talis

Luuny seems like a bot to me? Are you?