Want to increase your app’s exposure and enhance the user’s experience at the same time? Then check out iOS 9’s new App Search APIs. App Search gives you the tools needed to index app content and make it searchable in Spotlight. Also, the look and functionality of Spotlight search results can be customized to better fit the content of the app.
Nice job on the tutorial.
Is the Public indexing only for apps with matching websites using web markup? Or could you use it on a standalone app to increase findability.
Hi endodoug,
Very good question. I had to do some research to find out for sure myself. Based on what I found, no, a matching website isn’t required to use public indexing.
Now, having a public website tied to your app does allow Apple web-bot to grab its publicly-available data and index it which could increase traffic to your app. But user activities marked as eligibleForPublicIndexing in the app do not appear to be directly tied to a website.
Also, as you probably know, Apple doesn’t immediately add public user activities to their server index. It requires a ‘magic’ number of others using the app who have triggered the same activity content.
Owen