This is not that surprising; almost* any time you have a search interface that gives previews or suggestions as you type, the search provider gets that exact same info. It seems here that Apple is explicitly using this for analytics (since the article mentions that it’s not the endpoint used for suggestions), so that does imply they’re using this data, but imo there’s no significant difference between that and, say, what Google search collects when you type each letter of your query. Like, even if Google isn’t sending these events separately, you can be 99.999% sure they’re logging it and using it for analytics.

* the exception here would be if your computer has the entire set of data it’s searching through, then it doesn’t have to make a round trip that to a server, but this is not too common, especially in web interfaces. The most notable thing that I can think of is search on static blog-like websites, which is sometimes implemented using this technique because the search space is small, it simplifies hosting, its privacy respecting, and it’s faster. But you can’t really use this technology for something as big as the app store.

google has been doing that shit since like 2010

most web analytics software does all this in the background on a large swath of websites you visit too… they see where your cursor goes, what keys you press, etc

This is a very useful feature for identifying (and then doing nothing helpful for) suicidal people who type and then delete things!