iPhone Mobile App Discovery with Bing
There are more than half a million apps on the market. If you know exactly which app you are looking for, finding it can be relatively easy; however, sifting through the volume of apps one by one to find the right one for the right task can be overwhelming.
Context & Ripple Effects
Microsoft is extending Bing deeper into Apple's territory: after putting Bing onto the iPhone in early 2010 — which one analysis framed as Microsoft's 'ultimate mobile coup' (Bing on iPhone) — and building out entertainment verticals with full music streaming and TV listings in June 2010 (Bing Entertainment), it is now attacking a specific pain point on iOS itself. The problem is old: back in December 2008 VentureBeat flagged that iPhone users would soon need folders and search to cope with app sprawl (the need for iPhone app folders and search).
With the market past half a million apps, Bing is positioning itself as a discovery layer that sits outside the App Store's own rankings — a move that matters because whoever routes users to an app captures the intent, and the ad value, that Apple currently monopolizes on its own device.
First-order effects
- iPhone users gain a third-party way to find apps by task rather than browsing the App Store, and Microsoft gets direct visibility into iOS app-search intent — query data it cannot obtain through Safari alone.
- Apple's App Store search box loses its position as the only practical discovery surface on the iPhone, at least for users who opt into Bing.
Second-order effects
- Google has to answer on its own turf and inside iOS, since app-discovery queries are a natural extension of mobile web search it already serves on the same devices.
- Developers face a second ranking system to optimize for alongside App Store placement, splitting their discoverability strategy between Apple's storefront and an external index.
Third-order effects
- If search engines keep treating apps as indexed content rather than opaque storefront inventory, the line between web search and app-store search erodes — and the platform owner's control over on-device discovery becomes contested infrastructure rather than a given.
- App distribution drifts toward a model where visibility is won across multiple engines, weakening the single-gatekeeper structure Apple built around the App Store.
The trend: Search engines are expanding from indexing web pages to routing users to individual apps, turning app discovery into a battleground between platform owners like Apple and general-purpose engines like Microsoft and Google.