App Store is to Yahoo as AppStoreHQ is to Google

When we talk to iPhone app developers about the challenges they face, we hear the same story over and over. It goes something like this: “In the early days, if you could get your app approved by Apple you had a decent chance of being discovered and making it into the top 100. But now there are so many new apps that it’s easy to get lost in the shuffle, and only the most breakout apps ever make it into the top lists.”

Some of us here at AppStoreHQ are old enough to have witnessed the explosive growth in web pages that occurred in the early days of the web, and this emerging app discovery problem reminds us of nothing so much as the transition from directory-based approaches to web navigation like DMOZ and Yahoo, to the search-based approach commercialized by Google.

Like webmasters back in the day, mobile app developers can no longer rely on their App Store directory listing alone to drive downloads. All of a sudden, developers have to do more than build great software. They have to become marketers and worry about things like search engine optimization, the sales funnel, conversion rates and other arcana that (seemingly) have nothing to do with creating an amazing user experience on a mobile device. And that’s why we created AppStoreHQ.

AppStoreHQ is designed to help smartphone users discover the best new mobile applications. If we do that part right, we also hope to earn our users’ trust and gain their permission to deliver relevant and timely marketing messages about the kinds of apps they’re looking for. We have a long way to go before we’ve even made good on the first part of that promise, but our ambition is clear: we want nothing less than to become “the Google of iPhone apps”, helping end-users make the most of their device *and* helping app developers spread the word about their good work. Have suggestions for how we can get there? Let us know.