Paul Boutin at VentureBeat just posted this great writeup on our new Android apps catalog (love the headline!): “Now you can shop for Android apps without Android“
TechFlash is the top tech news outlet in the Pacific Northwest and John Cook is quick to jump on a story when it hits - here’s his piece on our new Android apps offering: “AppStoreHQ looks to help Android users find new apps”
Thanks for the great writeup, John!
That was fast! We just announced our Android app search + discovery service this morning, and it already got picked up by IntoMobile, which is pretty much the gold standard for mobile industry news as far as we’re concerned.
Thanks for the great writeup, guys!
We just got into the Android app discovery business in a big way - here’s the “official” story on what we’re up to…
Leading iPhone app search engine AppStoreHQ announces full-store Android app search + discovery platform for consumers and publishers
Seattle, WA - Tuesday March 16, 2010 - Google is the undisputed king of the web, with one odd exception: the world’s leading search engine currently doesn’t offer a web-based version of Android Market, the app store for their fast-growing Android mobile operating system.
Until recently, Android phone owners, tech journalists, bloggers and enthusiasts could only access Android apps via a proprietary store browser installed on an Android-powered handset, a surprising contrast to Apple’s ubiquitous iTunes shopping experience, which offers both desktop and web-based profile pages for every iPhone app.
Enter AppStoreHQ.
Already the leading independent discovery platform for iPhone apps, AppStoreHQ (http://www.appstorehq.com/) has just released the first fully-featured web-based search and discovery service for the Android platform. “We’re huge Android fans here at AppStoreHQ”, says Chris DeVore, the company’s CEO and co-founder, “and there are thousands of great apps out there for Android users, but they’re surprisingly hard to find.” By offering an independent, web-based discovery service for Android apps, AppStoreHQ aims to help Android device owners make the most of their phones, and also to shine a light on the remarkable innovation taking place in the Android developer community.
AppStoreHQ’s Android app directory can be found at: http://www.appstorehq.com/android-apps
Simultaneous with the release of their direct-to-consumer Android offering, the company is also announcing a free Android app search and discovery platform for third-party publishers. Android news and reviews sites DroidDog (http://www.droiddog.com/) and AndroidTapp (http://www.androidtapp.com/) are the first to take advantage of the new program, joining a long list of top iPhone blogs already participating in the company’s related offering for the Apple platform. ”Thanks to AppStoreHQ, we can now deliver a complete Android app discovery experience right on our own site,” says John Walton, DroidDog’s managing editor, “and for the first time since we launched we can also point our readers to an authoritative listing on the Web for any Android app we write about.”
For consumers and Android enthusiasts, this new service includes:
For Android publishers, AppStoreHQ also offers:
About AppStoreHQ
AppStoreHQ (http://www.appstorehq.com) is the leading independent search engine for smartphone apps, offering daily app rankings based on application reviews and mentions across dozens of tech blogs worldwide and app-related tweets from tens of thousands of Twitter users. The company was named “Best Mobile Service Startup” at MobileBeat 2009, and has been featured in VentureBeat, TechCrunch, and The New York Times | Gadgetwise. AppStoreHQ was created by Chris DeVore and Ian Sefferman and is backed by Founder’s Co-op, a Seattle-based venture fund focused on seed- and early-stage software companies in the Pacific Northwest.
We just got a tip from Scott Kveton at Urban Airship (which also appears on the list) that Elance has included our developer forum iPhoneDevSDK as one of the 10 Best Websites and Resources for iPhone Development.
We’re very proud of the iPhoneDevSDK community - it’s an incredibly helpful and supportive group of developers who go out of their way to help newbies and experienced devs alike solve problems and build great apps. We know from the site’s incredible traffic and fast-growing member base that others feel the same way, but it’s always nice to get an “attaboy” from an unexpected source. Great work gang!
We know you’re busy. Too busy to go digging through the App Store looking for cool new apps. Too busy to even think about visiting a website dedicated to showcasing the best new apps (uh, that would be us).
No problem. Our goal in life is to make it completely effortless for you to discover new apps that are just right for you. If you’ve ever shared your favorite apps with friends via Twitter, we already have personalized app recommendations for you (we do the same if you use AppStoreHQ to bookmark your favorites with our ‘love’ + ‘save’ buttons).
Today we moved one step closer to our ultimate goal of recommending apps based purely on ambient brainwave analysis. Since you’re too busy to come to us, AppStoreHQ now comes to your inbox once a week with personalized app recommendations developed uniquely for you.
How do we build out your personal recommendations? The same way Amazon.com makes shopping recommendations for you based on your purchase history:
We can only do this for you if you’ve registered at AppStoreHQ, or signed up for our weekly emails (use the “Subscribe via email” box shown everywhere on our site). So get on that.
Once you’re signed up, your weekly recommendations email looks something like the image below. And remember: the more you tweet about your favorite apps (or bookmark them on our site), the better your recommendations will get.
Two days ago we posted about our mobile web app submission tool, inviting any ‘sexy app’ developer who was thrown out of the App Store to refactor their native app for web distribution and list it with us (to avoid confusion with mainstream Entertainment apps we created a new category for these apps - XXX / Adult).
We know it will take time for most developers to rebuild their native apps as mobile web apps, but we’re happy to report that our new category is up and running and we have our first XXX / Adult listing - an HTML5 effort no less - in PocketPoon (*very* NSFW). For the time being they have the category to themselves, but we don’t expect that situation to last…
As everyone knows by now, the iPhone developer world was caught off-guard by Apple’s sudden and sweeping ban on “sexy” apps in the app store (or at least the ones not created by an established media brand). Apple was already infamous for its arbitrary and capricious app approval process, so in one sense this is just one more chapter in a long saga. But for any developer who had built a business around ‘adult-themed’ iPhone apps (and there are a lot of you out there), the change is a major kick in the nuts.
We aren’t big fans of censorship here at AppStoreHQ, and since we just shipped support for web app discovery in addition to our native iPhone app service, we have a proposition for you: if you want to turn your banned iPhone app into a web app (or, coming soon, an Android app), we’ll help you spread the word.
Interested? Here’s all you need to do:
We’ll build a sweet-looking landing page for your app and give you access to our entire arsenal of free and paid app promotion tools to help you promote it (we’ll even let you participate in a private beta that allows you to charge for web apps on our site).
So don’t get mad, get even - web apps are the future of mobile anyway, and Apple’s latest move just helped the future arrive a little sooner.
Last week we announced our support for HTML5 apps on AppStoreHQ, but at the time we didn’t have much inventory to display (to be honest, it was pretty much limited to Google Voice for Mobile). We’ve been cranking away since then and now have some more good news to share:
We had barely shipped the submission feature when we received two new app listings from Geocentric, a web software and services company in Silver Spring, Maryland. They have 10 XHTML apps in market right now, including Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership and Downtown Raleigh Alliance. Less than 24 hours after submitting their app details, their listings were live on AppStoreHQ!
So if you’re a mobile web app developer (whether in HTML5 or otherwise) and want to showcase your app on AppStoreHQ, we’re here to help. Just use our web app submission form to tell us where to find your app and what content you want to appear in your app listing. Once we’ve verified your info we’ll publish your listing and hand the keys over to you to edit your listing, track your view stats and generally spread the word.
We still have some work to do to make these apps more visible on AppStoreHQ, but that’s in the works. In the interim, all of our usual free and paid promotional tools are available for these apps, including personalized app recommendations based on your app-related Tweets.
Let the browser-based mobile app revolution begin!
The mobile developer community was already hot for HTML5 before Google Voice shipped their latest version. By offering app-like capabilities within the browser, HTML5 offers app developers a new creative outlet that doesn’t require anyone’s <cough-Steve Jobs-cough> permission to ship or distribute. Emerging technical standards may not interest iPhone owners, but HTML5 is a huge opportunity for the mobile developer community, which has chafed under the opaque and unilateral rule of Apple’s approval process. The Google Voice release fired a shot across Apple’s bow that every mobile developer (and lots of tech bloggers, too) sat up and noticed.
Not surprisingly, if iPhone (and other mobile platform) developers are passionate about something, you can bet that the team at AppStoreHQ (and our developer forum, iPhoneDevSDK) are stoked about it too. We still have a ton of work to do to flesh out our catalog, but given the blaze of enthusiasm triggered by the Google Voice update (and our general ‘Fire + Motion’ tendencies) we just couldn’t help ourselves:
Effective today, AppStoreHQ now offers search and discovery of HTML5 apps in addition to our existing native iPhone app offerings. Our HTML5 app inventory is still pretty limited (read on to see how you can help), but you can now:
All we need now is to build the biggest, most comprehensive directory of HTML5 apps on the web, and WE NEED YOUR HELP! If you want to give your favorite HTML5 developer a leg up on getting found, please send them our way, tell us about their apps, and generally SPREAD THE WORD! Let’s make an HTML5 revolution! (or at least tilt the mobile apps playing field a tiny bit back in the indie direction).
C’mon people! Let’s do this!
