I have dozens of apps in my iOS App Store that have updates available, but I have no interest in updating most of them. There are certain apps though that if an update were available I would want to install it. But I can't find any rhyme or reason to how the updates are sorted in that section of the App Store app which makes it harder for me to see if something is available short of slowly scrolling through the whole list or searching for that app directly.
So how are they organized?
Not to be flippant but I don't think anyone outside of Apple knows. I've had Apple products for years and my only guess is they're rolled out within a specific time after their review has completed. We don't know when the apps are reviewed, except for our own, so we don't know how we stack-up against the other apps that have been updated.
I'm just going to say it's random. I've tried looking at it across various ways it could be sorted, there's no organization. I've updated all apps and watched new updates come in, and when another app has a new update available, there is no way to predict where in the list of updates it will show up.
However, in the updates section for iOS apps in iTunes, they appear to be sorted alphabetically with sort options. Hopefully that will be extended to iOS in the future.
