I tell people about the Rachel Maddow iPhone app all the time; almost no one has heard of it, but it's great. From now on I won't just tell them about it - I'll share a link to it by email with just a few clicks in the new iPhone app from Appsfire, just approved by the App Store last night.
Appsfire is a handy little service that makes it easy to share collections of your favorite apps with other people. There are a variety of ways to use it, but using it on the iPhone is the most pleasing, straightforward and clearly useful. This app indexes all your other apps, makes it easy to share with anyone and shows off the most popular apps shared by all users and users in your geographic region. It's far from perfect, but it's so useful anyway that we recommend you get it.
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Using the app couldn't be simpler and it fills a need many of us have felt since getting our phones. It's fun to learn about what apps your friends have and there's no easier way to do that. You do need to download a desktop app in order to capture the list of apps on your phone, but that's not hard to do at all.
That said, there are some things about the app that could use some improvement. Days after I first synced my phone up with Appsfire, it has still only indexed 37 of the 43 apps I have on my phone. It's a little embarrassing to show off your collection of apps if some of the coolest ones don't show up. ReadWriteWeb's Sarah Perez tested it as well and says that, "It only saw 79 of my 107 apps (and one was wrong). Bummer. Still way cool though."
Since there's no App Store API that can be used, Appsfire has to learn about the apps its users have by brute force pinging the Store's directory. The company told me my apps would be found within hours but it doesn't look like they are going to show up. That's a real shame because several of the missing ones are among my favorites. Some that it's missing are obscure, but others like the NYT app are not.
Several of us tested the service and found that it only captures about 70% of the apps on our phones. That's pretty disappointing, but hopefully it will be fixed in time. For now, being able to share from that 70% is much better than not being able to share at all. Here are my favorites, here are Frederick Lardinois' and here's Sarah Perez's massive collection of apps she loves.
When looking at the app leader boards by region and "VIP Selections" (disclosure: my favorite apps are highlighted on the service) it would be really nice if you could learn more about the apps from inside the Appsfire interface. Instead the app store launches and Appsfire closes. This transition can be quite slow, too.
Those problems notwithstanding, it's pretty awesome to be able to share links to your favorite apps with other people via email in just a few clicks. You'd be silly not to grab this app; you're likely to regret it later in conversations about your favorite other apps if you don't.
We'd love to see links to the Appsfire pages of readers! Please leave yours in the comments below so we can discover what apps you like.
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