#core spotlight api

Image credit: Business Insider

With the release of iOS9, Spotlight immediately provided a massive boon for app developers and marketers. Gone were the days where the pages of your app remained passively undiscoverable, patiently waiting for existing users to accidentally realize that content existed. Core Spotlight finally allows you to actively put your content in front of your users, all while they are looking for it from an OS level.

This is great news!

But, as many marketers and observers are quickly realizing and noting, the first version of deep-linked Spotlight Search is very limited in scope. Because this is a new feature and because Apple doesn’t provide any intelligence around helping the most relevant content to surface, each app is tasked with building a comprehensive strategy around Spotlight and app search. That doesn’t seem scalable, or particularly helpful to users, or to us app marketers!

And that’s where we come in.

We’re sooo pumped to announce Spotlight Optimization, a easy-to-integrate tool that helps your content be found in iOS Spotlight search. This tool will be included in the next version of the AppWords SDK. At it’s core, Spotlight Optimization alleviates your need to pass info to the device, instead passing only relevant pages (on a per-user basis) to the Spotlight index on-the-fly. Now you can use that time to do other things that are more core to your business.

In short: We got you, boo...  (sorry about using that heavy technical mumbo-jumbo)

So what is this, really?

Who has the time to design, build, and manage an app search strategy? AppWords will be the brains for you, and decide which of your content pages are relevant to your users in real-time. Forget about serving your users pages that they have already seen (because that’s really just bookmarking, right?). Let your users experience all of the pages in your app, especially the ones that they haven’t seen yet.

How can you integrate?

For details, check out: https://www.deeplink.me/spotlightoptimization

To start the integration, check out: https://cocoapods.org/pods/AppWords  (about 5 minutes of dev work)

How much does it cost to use?

Spotlight Optimization was built as part of a more advanced deeplink.me platform feature set. All of our Pro and Enterprise partners get to free reign with Spotlight Optimization, so use it, love it, and tell us what we could do better.

No, we’re serious!

Aren’t you guys a deep linking company? Why did you build this?

Well sure, we’ve built some badass deep linking functionality (and there’s more coming). But our DNA is really that of a search company. And we’re also an app growth company. So <forced_modesty>we’re pretty good</forced_modesty> at crawling app pages, understanding content and context, and preemptively serving it up to users. Heck, we built a whole platform just on that premise!

So, now that Spotlight Search is here, why not help make it really sing? So that’s what we’ve done! And you get to reap the benefit!

Let us know if you have questions! We are here to help, and we love to hear ideas and thoughts on our products.

The leaves are changing, and the nights are getting cooler. That means that the iOS9 release is quickly approaching!

IS YOUR APP READY?

As you may remember from WWDC a few months ago, iOS9 is packed with new features, awesome functionality improvements, and upgrades to much of the core OS. For those of us in the deep linking world, there are a few that we’ve been particularly keen on. Most specifically, the new Core Spotlight APIs and Universal Links. Here is your crash-course on each, and how they will effect your existing Deeplink functionality.

Universal Links

This announcement was huge for app engagement! It means that web URLs will now open your app (no Safari interstitial) if your app supports Universal Links. We’re excited to announce that Deeplink fully supports Apple’s Universal Links. And if your app doesn’t support universal linking on rollout, that’s cool too, as we can still support deep linking in iOS 9 in a very similar fashion to how we do it today.

Core Spotlight API

This is the announcement that got much of the attention... Craig Federighi stood up on stage and talked about how broken mobile search is (Ahem!) and how signaling has changed (<cough>). And then he dropped the bomb. Spotlight Search will now search INSIDE your apps (duh!).

To make this magic work, you’ll need to support Apple’s Core Spotlight APIs. It’s super easy. Once you do, users can search your content with a query (sort of like Google search on desktop, but for app content).

But that still leaves a gaping hole in UX. Your app content is still only available when a user deems it the right time to find it. What about those times where a user does something complementary? Aren’t those perfect times to serve your app content to them?

They certainly are. So, we’ve added a crazy-awesome, incredibly simple solution to the AppWords SDK. With a simple 30-second CocoaPods integration, you’ll also get found in relevant apps from the Deeplink network.

Go here--> AppWords iOS SDK.  Do it now. 

No visual display in your apps, no updating necessary, just a free tool to get found in thousands of apps when iOS9 launches.