Appolicious is another iPhone app that offers app recommendations and sets out to help you find good iPhone apps.
As the numbers of apps in the App Store grows to increasingly unreal sorts of numbers, the need for more and better ways to discover apps becomes more urgent “ for us as users and for developers as well. In my book, any decent new method for getting app suggestions is very welcome, and Appolicious looks like it may fit the bill.
Appolicious is a very good looking app. The UI is easy enough to navigate around and looks sleek all the way around.
To get started with the app, you need to create a free account with Appolicious. This is pretty painless “ with only a desired username, email address, and password required to setup an account. You also need to verify your account (via the customary click of a link in a confirmation email) before you can add friends within the app (to get recommendations from).
The three main sections of the app “ reachable with one tap in the bottom nav bar “ are: Recommended, Advisor, and Search. The fourth tab, Info, is just a reminder to check out the Appolicious web site.
The Recommended section is the heart of the app, and offers recommendations in three areas, which are: From Appolicious, From People You Follow, and From People Like You.
From Appolicious starts off a bit all over the place, because it (sadly) does not pull in data on all your currently (or past) installed apps. Once you start providing it with some feedback on recommendations, and telling it a bit about what ‘kind of user ‘ you are, it seems to smarten up pretty quickly.
Filling in details to help it get to know you is pretty basic “ you just tick off some categories that say how you would describe the type of user you are:
You also help it along with the responses you give to each recommendation you receive. The recommendations list views present some good, concise summary info: app name and icon, its category, number of users (in Applocious) that own the app, its rating (within Appolicious) and price.
When you tap on an app from one of your recommendations lists, you get a full screen with more info on the app “ including ratings, developer notes, screenshots, and video links. On this screen you can let Appolicious know if you already own the app, are not interested in it, or rate and review it yourself. You can also tap the download link to go straight to its App Store page.
On the From People You Follow screen you can view recommends from people you ‘re following, and find people to follow. Right now there seem to be very few folks around as choices here. The app is quite new, so that ‘s understandable and will hopefully pick up soon “ as this will be a major strength or weakness for the app based on the numbers of users it pulls.
The area for rating an app is also nicely laid out and simple to use
The Advisor section offers up some articles offering further roundups of apps for situations / occasions (including one for New Years apps right now)
So far, Appolicious looks fairly promising “ and again, these days the more resources we have for finding apps, the better. It has some clear drawbacks at the moment: not very many users as yet, so very few people to follow and get recommends from; sparse on ratings / reviews, and it does not pull your existing apps owned / installed data to get a headstart on ‘profiling ‘ you as an app user. That last one seems like a must-add in future updates, and the user-base needs to grow a lot for this to become a truly useful tool.
You can find Appolicious in the App Store now, and it is a free app. If you want to follow me / trade suggestions, I am on there as ‘patrickj ‘.
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TAGS: iphone apps
