It Takes 100+ Swipes To Find The Latest Hot iPhone App, And That's Dangerous For Apple

You use it to post anonymous secrets. For the past two days it's all anyone is talking about on Twitter.

The good news for Apple is that it's available on iPhone.

You can download Secret for iPhone here.

The bad news for Apple is that it's really hard to find Secret through the App Store app on your iPhone.

If you put "Secret" in the App Store search bar and then tap "search," an app called Private Photo Vault comes up. A preview of Private Photo Vault takes up the whole iPhone screen. If you swipe to the right, you get "Secret Apps Lite."

It takes about 107 swipes before you finally - FINALLY - get to "Secret - Speak Freely."

Before you get there you have to go through seemingly unrelated results like "WATCH ABC Family" and "Stair Dismount" and "Duckers," a game by Retro Dreamer.

107 swipes!

It turns out the easiest way to find and install Secret on your iPhone is to open your Safari browser and start typing "Secret app" in the Google search bar. As you do, Google will suggest a more complete search query: "Secret app for iphone."

That will bring up an article from Complex about the app. The article includes a link to the app's web page, which includes a link to the App Store page.

Insanity.

Apple tried to solve this problem buy acquiring startup Chomp last February. But apparently the people who ran Chomp are now working on Apple Maps?

This is a dangerous situation for Apple.

It cedes control over iPhone app discovery to Google. The App Store loses a lot of value if it's not the first place people think to go to when they hear about a cool new app.

More importantly, it's a lousy user experience and Apple is supposed to be the best at user experiences. That's their thing.