The Android marketplace, Google Play, may
now be catching up with the Apple App Store
in terms of sheer number of applications
available, but finding the better-quality apps
outside of the big names is still something of
a challenge. Today, an app discovery service
called Appreciate has launched on the Android
app store to address this problem.
The company was founded two years ago by
CEO Amir Maor and CTO Yaron Segalov, both
who have previous experience in the mobile
industry and with big data. As they developed
the concept which has become today’s new
Appreciate application, earlier prototypes
released into the Android marketplace gained
tens, and even hundreds of thousands of
installs, indicating demand for the service
they’ve been building
Maor notes that the first version of the app
reached over half a million installs, even
though it was more prototype than finished
release. The private beta launched around a
month ago has already gained 10,000 users.
While backend of these apps has evolved over
the years, the version of Appreciate launching
today would be unrecognizable to any of the
company’s previous users.
It’s not just the overall look-and-feel that’s
changed, it’s the entire way the new app
discovery service has been set up, the way it
works, the navigation, the personalized
recommendations it delivers, and more.
Like many startup founders, Maor cites a
personal need as the inspiration for building
Appreciate, originally. “As the number of apps
grew, we found it harder to find good content
for our mobile phones,” he says. “It started
with just finding quality apps, and that
improved over time. But then, even though we
could find quality apps, it got harder to find
those that were more suited to what we were
interested in.”
Maor says that though it has become easy
enough to find the Android app blockbusters,
sifting through a narrower category, like chess
games or arcade games (his personal favorite)
is difficult.
With Appreciate, while the user interface is
attractive, the power in this service is the
algorithms on the backend. Appreciate not
only understands which apps are quality apps
– a metric it understands by analyzing a
variety of specific signals – it also matches
those apps to a user’s unique personal tastes.
Appreciate doesn’t determine an app’s
“quality” based on ratings or reviews, however,
which Maor explains can be less than reliable.
Instead, its secret sauce looks for other
indicators – like whether or not users have
installed the app then rapidly uninstalled it, for
example – a sure signal that it may have left
something to be desired. Apps with a good
install base across your social network may
also be recommended, as are those other
Appreciate users have indicated are good, too.
Appreciate works better for those who sign in
using Facebook, however it already knows a
little about users’ tastes from the apps
installed on their own devices. Within the app,
users are encouraged to follow other “experts”
who are also interested in the same types of
apps, which also gives Appreciate a social
network feel, to some extent.
In addition to expert recommendations, users
also get personalized feeds showing app
recommendations, apps trending across
favorite categories, friend notifications, and a
personalized app search engine which shows
results indicating which apps are used by
friends.
For example, if Appreciate knows you love
wildlife, a search for “birds” might return an
app about actual birds, not the Angry kind.
Appreciate is available now in Google Play,
and the plan is to bring the service to the
iPhone in the future. However, Maor admits
that he, like many developers today, doesn’t
really understand Apple’s new clauses around
its ban on app discovery service. “It won’t be
just mimicking an app store,” he says. “We
hope everything will work well and they’ll
actually approve it.”
Time will tell.
Based in Israel, the ten-person company has
several million in seed and Series A funding by
Magma Ventures, and many undisclosed angel
investors.
source:techcrunch.com
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