After a couple of days of “sales”, Triviata has not proved to be a huge success on the tvOS App Store. I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

Even worse, Triviata has dropped several places on the “TRIV” store search due to new competing products.

Well to hell with that.

I’ve decided to take the classic route of dropping the price to free for a while to see if it can gain store position. (Good thing this isn’t a serious business investment and is more a way to explore the store because…golly.)

Please grab a free copy and let’s see if I can push this baby up the charts. For science! And kittens! And feels!

After updating my pricing details on iTunes Connect, I spent significant time checking whether the listing had updated. That of course was a major pain. The Apple TV app store is not, how shall we say, “friendly”.

So I used my “link opener” opener, which I described in this post to jump directly to the app listing. Because why not jump with a single “Go” button rather than laboriously typing T, then R, then I, then…you get the picture.

Since I’m probably not the only person who will ever be doing this, I’ve put the link opener utility on github. And then I got inspired. What if I could just put a search term in instead and see the search results without the whole scrooooooooollll click scrolllllllllllllclick search routine.

I tried (and I mean really tried) to hack together a solution for searching the store from an app but could not come up with anything. While URLs based on MZSearch.woa are legal and recognized by UIApplication, they lead nowhere meaningful. You get an App Store icon, a spinning wheel, and then nothing.

In similar matters, I have yet been unable to find a way to scrape Apple TV top charts and search results yet. And no, you can’t just sync a Bluetooth Keyboard to your ATV, a decision that completely mystifies me.

Oh well.

In any case, let me know if you find the repo useful and please do download a free copy of the app. I want to run more experiments and I can’t do that when my app isn’t even visible. Thanks!