Recently we wrote about the disjointed app discovery process and the large influence that reviews have in the success or failure of your app.
This post was inspired by the Twindr team’s article on Medium regarding how broken the app discovery process is and this Forbes article that goes into detail about the difficulties independent app developers have getting their apps discovered.
In the current state of the App Store if you don’t have thousands of dollars to spend to drive paid downloads of your app to join a Top 100 list your app may languish in obscurity. It’s no longer enough to just release an app and expect thousands of users to download it like you could 3 years ago.
These articles about the difficulty of app discovery got us thinking about how we discover apps. Outside of browsing the Featured Apps and Top App Lists in the App Store we find out about new apps from our friends and families. This gave us an idea to improve app discovery.
The team at 716 Labs has developed a new app called AppFinder that provides app recommendations using a custom algorithm that we’ve developed that matches your app preferences to those of others like you.
The concept of the app is simple - you open AppFinder and an app is shown to you.
Apps appear in your feed
If you don’t like the app swipe it left and it disappears and a new app is shown.
Swipe left if you don’t like it…
If you like the app and would recommend it to others just swipe it to the right.
We save your choice and show you another app to do the same thing again and again. At any point if you want more details about the app you just tap the app icon to go to the App Store.
As you tell AppFinder about the apps you like our algorithm learns from your preferences and suggests apps that you are more likely to be interested in. In addition AppFinder lets you ‘follow’ your friends and family that use the app to get even more personalized recommendations. The recommendations of those that you follow have a greater influence on the apps that will show up in your app feed as you swipe through apps.
We believe that AppFinder is going to make app discovery more fun and you’re going to learn about new apps that you would have never even known existed. AppFinder will be available for the iPhone and iPad and it will be a free download.
We’ve just submit AppFinder for Apple’s review and we hope it will be released in the App Store in the coming weeks. In the meantime take a look at the new AppFinder homepage to learn more and sign up for our email list to get an email when the app is released an available for you to download and discover great new apps with your family and friends.
Once AppFinder has been approved by Apple and released in the App Store we’re going to follow up with another post detailing how we took the inspiration from developers’ feedback about the problems with app discovery and turned it into a new app to solve the problem all in about 2 weeks. We’ll tell you about the process we used and the tools available that helped speed up our development process.