How Apple’s App Store search ads will affect developers and users

Apple’s App Store has gotten so big since launching in 2008 that apps are getting buried in search results and developers are missing out on users and revenue. Today, Apple announced a new approach to solving that problem: advertising.

That’s right. Ads will start showing up at the top of Apple’s App Store (for U.S. users). The beta program begins this summer, Apple said in a blog post. (In the same blog post, Apple also announced that automatically renewing subscriptions will be coming to the App Store for all app categories in the fall, and that after one year, developers can get 85 percent of revenue, not just 70 percent.)