Mobile Applications Era: Application Search - A Real Story in the Age of AppStor Prosperity
With the development of custom personal devices, technologies and platforms, the access of consumers and third-party companies to the formation of the final product has become a reality.
The giants Apple and Google quickly realized that it was impossible to control absolutely all aspects of the development and development of services, in addition, by opening access to application development technologies to third-party companies, they got an excellent tool for determining the products most demanded by users and additional tools for monetizing the application market. As a bonus from the “open door” policy, these companies have the opportunity to purchase various insights in the future to improve and develop their own services.
As a result, hundreds of thousands of developers, millions of applications, and the widespread replacement of simple mobile phones with functional smartphones.
It quickly became clear that against the backdrop of this abundance of offers, finding the right and high-quality applications for the user is becoming not only an urgent, but also not entirely trivial task. To help AppStors with their imperfect search systems, user reviews and ratings, came blogs, community sites and application portals, with their own ratings, rating systems and catalogs.
Companies specializing in application discovery were not long in coming. Alternative application sites are formed on the basis of more technological solutions that work with data that can be obtained directly from the AppStor directories. Some of them show impressive results when working with certain categories of applications.
A good example is the AppsFire service . It attracts the mass consumer by providing collected information about new applications and software, which are discounted. In addition, AppsFire maintains a user-friendly catalog form and gives you the opportunity to recommend your favorite applications.
An example of a different approach to the application recommendation service is the Zwapp project .working directly with the contents of the user's phone. It identifies already installed applications and forms user profiles in the form of application collections. Zwapp uses mechanisms similar to social networks to organize connections and relationships between users.
In addition, it is worth mentioning companies that develop application search technologies, including uQuery and Chomp . The latter since February 2012 is part of Apple, and in October was completely closed to users. A good and convenient search organization is an integral part of any such service, which does not require special comments.
Search engines Yandex and Google also rushed to take their market share. Google developers went the proven way and added the application search section to the main search system, along with searching by images, videos, maps, etc. Yandex introduced a mobile version of the application search service, the main advantage of which is the implementation of the search by keywords.
The Russian-speaking sector cannot boast of a large number of specialized search services for applications, but the niche is still gradually filling up. Among newcomers, TheAppBay is more or less interesting , using the principle of recommendations from users, especially if in the future developers will supplement it with advanced filters according to various criteria.
Only about two dozen companies are working today in one form or another on the problem of applications discovery, which is already a lot.
They constantly test the relevance and convenience of various approaches and application search models. Today, all services in this area are united by dependence, to one degree or another, on platform holders - Apple, Google, and others, whose interfaces and infrastructure are the limiting factor that no player in the market’s discovery can influence. For the same reason, the end user with his interests, preferences and behavioral characteristics are not the central element of these services. Will the situation change over time? Who knows.
The giants Apple and Google quickly realized that it was impossible to control absolutely all aspects of the development and development of services, in addition, by opening access to application development technologies to third-party companies, they got an excellent tool for determining the products most demanded by users and additional tools for monetizing the application market. As a bonus from the “open door” policy, these companies have the opportunity to purchase various insights in the future to improve and develop their own services.
As a result, hundreds of thousands of developers, millions of applications, and the widespread replacement of simple mobile phones with functional smartphones.
It quickly became clear that against the backdrop of this abundance of offers, finding the right and high-quality applications for the user is becoming not only an urgent, but also not entirely trivial task. To help AppStors with their imperfect search systems, user reviews and ratings, came blogs, community sites and application portals, with their own ratings, rating systems and catalogs.
Companies specializing in application discovery were not long in coming. Alternative application sites are formed on the basis of more technological solutions that work with data that can be obtained directly from the AppStor directories. Some of them show impressive results when working with certain categories of applications.
A good example is the AppsFire service . It attracts the mass consumer by providing collected information about new applications and software, which are discounted. In addition, AppsFire maintains a user-friendly catalog form and gives you the opportunity to recommend your favorite applications.
An example of a different approach to the application recommendation service is the Zwapp project .working directly with the contents of the user's phone. It identifies already installed applications and forms user profiles in the form of application collections. Zwapp uses mechanisms similar to social networks to organize connections and relationships between users.
In addition, it is worth mentioning companies that develop application search technologies, including uQuery and Chomp . The latter since February 2012 is part of Apple, and in October was completely closed to users. A good and convenient search organization is an integral part of any such service, which does not require special comments.
Search engines Yandex and Google also rushed to take their market share. Google developers went the proven way and added the application search section to the main search system, along with searching by images, videos, maps, etc. Yandex introduced a mobile version of the application search service, the main advantage of which is the implementation of the search by keywords.
The Russian-speaking sector cannot boast of a large number of specialized search services for applications, but the niche is still gradually filling up. Among newcomers, TheAppBay is more or less interesting , using the principle of recommendations from users, especially if in the future developers will supplement it with advanced filters according to various criteria.
Only about two dozen companies are working today in one form or another on the problem of applications discovery, which is already a lot.
They constantly test the relevance and convenience of various approaches and application search models. Today, all services in this area are united by dependence, to one degree or another, on platform holders - Apple, Google, and others, whose interfaces and infrastructure are the limiting factor that no player in the market’s discovery can influence. For the same reason, the end user with his interests, preferences and behavioral characteristics are not the central element of these services. Will the situation change over time? Who knows.