Discovering Great iPhone Apps: 5 Recommendation Services Compared
The iPhone App Store is a blessing and a curse. It's one of the best things about the mobile platform, but it's so popular that finding great new apps to download can be a real challenge. Where there's a monetizable pain-point, services will flower! Enter a variety of new iPhone app recommendation services that aim to point you toward your next download and pocket the affiliate fees for paid apps.
Below we've posted a chart comparing the features of 5 new services for iPhone app discovery: Apple's own App Genius, a new social app discovery service called Chorus that launched to great press coverage this morning, a simple mobile sharing service called AppsFire, a remarkably similar service called Yappler and Appolicious, a website like Delicious for iPhone apps.
- Best mobile interface: App Genius, Apple's own service inside the app store. It's simple, it works quickly, gives fun recommendations on the phone and has easy access to app reviews. No one else has beat it, yet.
- Best web interface: Appolicious is awesome. There's a lot of things it doesn't do well, but it's web interface is fun to read, feature rich and solid. It's not a sharing service, it's a discovery service - and for that it does a good job. Yappler's is pretty good, too. No one is doing a great job of tying web and mobile together.
- Best sharing: Appsfire. Sharing apps is so easy with Appsfire I regularly fire it up just to share a link to Appsfire itself, then I add on a couple of other recommendations. Launch the app, click some of your apps you want to share with someone, then the share button opens an email with Appsfire links to all the selected apps. It's a fast, easy way to point someone to apps you think they'd like. The fact that you can do it from your phone to someone you're having a conversation with is key.
- Best recommendations: None. No one is doing a terribly good job at this, the most important feature. Chorus, the much-hyped new social recommendation service, appears promising but so far only offers an activityfeed view of a cold-start friends network with vague friend import options and a completely impersonal looking "recommended" section. Did we mention the spammy Twitter messages the company says it's going to soon stop sending through your account? The fake-looking testimonials from users on the company's home page? Ugh. It's disappointing that no one has nailed this yet, but it's very early days.
- Autodiscovery of the apps you already have: Everyone does it, Yappler has the best user experience in doing it.
- Discussion: Applocious is the best place to learn a lot about an app before downloading it. Yappler is a close second. Inclusion of video, screenshots, local and App Store reviews and other features are what make these two services stand out.
So...which of these should you try? That depends on what you're looking for, but I'd personally recommend checking out Appsfire and Appolicious right away. All of the services are worth checking out, though. Someone's going to knock this out of the park and become the Yellow Pages of iPhone apps. We're not there yet, though.
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You can also use Rankspeed to find the best iPhone apps providers according to a sentiment analysis on the Twittersphere:
http://bit.ly/4veEVD
We are a huge fan of iPhone apps here at CRB. We have numerous account executives that use them for business.
Marshall -
Thanks so much for the kind words and nice write up. And, especially, thanks for the great feedback.
We do have an editorial staff that does a series of write ups and reviews every day, in addition to user reviews -- and we provide three sets of recommendations: from our editors, from people you follow, and from people like you based on interest level.
We allow folks to share apps they love and like through the fresh feed, via twitter and facebook (we auto post when you review and rate).
Having said that, we will do a better job of really featuring those capabilities in addition to boosting our sharing capabilities.
Thanks again!
--Al
You may want to try our new iPhone app, Apptastic. 1st week on the store and we've had over 6000 downloads!
It allows you to recommend apps to friends and see your friends recommendations in-app. You can make wish lists, too. Also we've been monitoring the Top 100 RSS feed since July, so by browsing oldest recommendations first you can see past hits that are not there now. Unique to Apptastic on the iphone as far as I know (AppBeacon did this on line) is that it will automatically hide apps you scroll over (with a timer you set), so you can start looking where you left off next time. Never see the same apps again if you want. Should save you lots of time compared to browsing the app store.
We're submitting 1.1 today for approval, it will include discovery from your library like Appsfire, email of recommendations in-app, vote for features, and an auto google search of reviews.
Beyond that we are looking into new and updated apps feed,
but depends on how our users vote.
Recommendations of what you'll like are hard to do. One mans trash is another man's treasure. Genius is even hit and miss and it will always be the best. So we decided to cover current popular, lost popular, and what your friends say. Lots of good apps will pop up. Then we hide all the apps YOU think are junk. Once you've gone through all in a category, from then on you'll just see new recommendations or a new entry in the top 100.
Great post, Marshall - couldn't agree more with your assessment that "we're not there yet". The social & algorithmic approaches have promise, but need big datasets to generate meaningful results, and only Apple has the data right now.
Our view at AppStoreHQ is that there are lots of interesting ways to skin the app recommendations problem, and would rather give iPhone owners choices based on transparent methodologies. So...
... we can show you the most interesting apps right now based on what top bloggers (including R/WW think): http://www.appstorehq.com/hottest-iphone-apps
... we can also shine a light on the top apps in the Twittersphere: http://www.appstorehq.com/iphone-apps-twitter (interestingly, Chorus tops the charts right now thanks to their app-based spam)
... or you can build and save your own custom searches to track the categories and keywords most relevant to you: http://www.appstorehq.com/custom-lists
App discovery is definitely not a one-size-fits-all problem and the market is big enough for lots of players to find a home - thanks again for shining a light on some of the good work happening in this space right now.
Thanks Marshall
Happy to see Appsfire, a simple unfunded project being compared with those guys
We have not started yet. A lot is coming. and you'll soon have to add columns to your table :)
Ouriel Ohayon
AppsFire.com
Thanks Marshall
Happy to see Appsfire, a simple unfunded project being compared with those guys
We have not started yet. A lot is coming. and you'll soon have to add columns to your table :)
For example we just launched getAp.ps/yourApp the first shortURL that gives you full conversion and referrers stats for your App
Ouriel Ohayon
AppsFire.com
discovering and sharing (and monitoring discounts on apps) ?
There's an app for that ;) :
appconnect
I'm using it with a bunch of friends and it's a very good app (free).
All of these are missing a major feature in that they do not track sales of your favorite or reccommended apps. This is a great way to grab wish list apps and save some money. The only app I could find that does that is PandoraBox.
Are there any similar sites for Android Apps?
Thanks for sharing this information! Our new iPhone/Touch app, App Popular, is looking to be a force in this space. We're not there quite yet. Version 1.1 will be submitted soon and will offer two additional app discovery features. App Popular helps users discover, track, list and share the world's iPhone apps.
It is interesting to see all these sites offering social yellow pages for Apps popping up on the web. I wish there was a better way to populate the list of installed apps without having to access iTunes on the computer. I, for instance seldom use iTunes, since I mostly buy my content directly from the phone. Is there no way of accessing the file system (on the iPhone & Android) in "read" mode and getting hold of the information regarding installed apps on a device? I guess if it was possible e.g. Appsfire would have used the feature.
After trying all the mentioned serviced I have to admit that the best mobile service is the one provided by App Popular...
You forgot to mentio popular website www.appgiveaway.com this site is the leader in promoting iPhone and iPod Touch apps and was launched long before the one mentioned above.
Feel free to checkout http://www.appgiveaway.com and see why we are popular with those iPhone users that have been fortunate to discover the site
Don't forget http://www.appexplorer.com/ for iPhone app search...