How to find renamed app using old name in Spotlight?

We are planning on renaming our app. The new name is not like the current name. It will be renamed in the App Store as well as the App display name. Yet, we still want new and existing users to be able to find the app by using the old name in search/spotlight under iOS. A great example of this is entering Twitter to find the X app and it shows up in the App section in the Spotlight search.

Are there any guidelines, settings, or tricks for doing this? Some have suggested adding a Spotlight search term but that will not have it show up in the App section I fear.

Are there any guidelines, settings, or tricks for doing this?

No, not that I'm aware of. As far as I can tell, we've never provided any formal recommendations about how this "should" be done. Having said that...

A great example of this is entering Twitter to find the X app and it shows up in the App section in the Spotlight search.

...if you download "X.app" onto a Mac, it's not hard to see why that happens. iOS uses CFBundleDisplayName as the value it displays to the user, but it also indexes CFBundleName (which should match the file system name). So, if you have this configuration:

CFBundleDisplayName-> NewFoo
CFBundleName-> OldBar
File System Name-> OldBar.app

...then I believe you'll find that the user always see "NewFoo" but can find it by searching for "OldBar".

Finally, keep in mind that the App Library section adds another source of data into the mix. When an app is installed from the store, the system also receives an additional that includes data from the apps App Store record. That data includes things like the apps "full name", it's category data (which is how the App Library is able to sort apps), as well as other data.

As a concrete example of this, many apps on the store have a naming pattern that looks like this:

On Device-> <app name>.app

On App Store Name-> <app name> by <company name>

You'll find that apps like this can be found by search for company, even when the app itself doesn't contain any reference to company. That's because iOS indexed the name it got from the app store, which did include the company name.

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Kevin Elliott
DTS Engineer, CoreOS/Hardware

How to find renamed app using old name in Spotlight?
 
 
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