Show HN: AppApp.io – A better search for the iOS App Store | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: AppApp.io – A better search for the iOS App Store

appapp.io

32 pointsdansingerman43 comments

Interesting site. I love the ability to narrow down apps through an advanced search. However, I feel like it rewards apps with keywords in their titles over those that don't. Consider someone searching for "music". It's reasonable for Spotify to show up, or even my app Musi which currently ranks first for that keyword in the App Store since both of those apps heavily involve music. However, on AppApp, none of those are found. Instead, there are mostly music creation apps which generally include music in their titles, versus music listening apps which may not.

If Apple changed their search to work more like this, I would have to change my app name to "Music Player" to stay competitive, and add even more keywords in the title.

As it stands, I feel like Apple rewards popular apps a little too much and I like how this is a more literal search, but there is definitely merit in having a search which has understanding about what an app is about (which is what I believe Apple tries to do with their current App Store search).

Thanks for your comment. I do completely agree. The keywords that are entered by the developer for the iOS app are not exposed anywhere (API or otherwise) by Apple (as far as I know), so it is hard for us to index those.

For further phases we are looking into some sort of bayesian categorisation/tagging which can hopefully help with this problem.

You might also consider allowing developers to register and enter their keywords.

That's a great idea.

As to why the world might need another search for the App Store, I have written this blog: http://blog.appapp.io/post/131747237960/the-raison-detre-of-...

Sure, there's always an opportunity for building a better X. I'd like a better google in fact, and the App store has always had poor search.

The question, though, is what is your business model? If it's just a demo of your skills-- great. but if you want people to use it consistently or use it for years to come it needs a business model to sustain it.

Without that, its hard to know whether I should try and remember that this exists or not.

This isn't meant to be mean or anything like that, not even criticism, just my perspective.

As a starting point the site is part of the iTunes affiliate scheme. Hosting costs are fairly small, so as long as it covers its costs it'll be live perpetually. We also have other ideas for sources of revenue, this is just the MVP.

This is a nice alternative. Bookmarked! As I'm sure you know as a parent by now, the next nice-to-have feature would be to filter against apps that use ads. Worst offenders being full screen video ads you can't skip and banner ads placed close to buttons.

Children are quite vulnerable to believe what they're seeing in the ad verbatim. Then you're the bad guy for not agreeing to get them that game they just saw beeing so great. More importantly though, brainwashing with ads steals the time that was supposed to be spent on something else.

At least your "No IAP" filter already eliminates the awful apps that let children "earn coins" for watching ads.

I totally agree. Finding out which apps have ads like that is non-trivial, but we'll certainly look into it.

A whole world of new search vectors would open if you scraped and mined the reviews.

Have you done any usability testing regarding the choice of a fixed non-scrolling header for search? It's a pet peeve of mine but along with the cookie info footer and my browser chrome, there's a big chunk of my vertical space wasted -- feels like I'm peeping in through a fence. If I want to search, your main page is all about it, and I really don't feel like I need the search thing present at ALL times while looking at what I've already searched for.

Formally, no. I have had it beta tested by friends and family, and that is not something that has been mentioned.

I do have sympathy with your view on the desktop version. It originates from the mobile version (which was written first) which has infinite scroll rather than pagination, so I think it is more pertinent to keep the search term and the number of results on screen as the user scrolls down.

I possibly should just remove it from the desktop version.

I share similar feelings for the scrolling image viewer on the App page (screenshots). I'd rather scroll down over all images... you mirrored the apple page here, I don't like how they do it either

Live search pollutes the browser history with each letter typed. Otherwise - well done!

You're right, I'd like to address that in some sort of sensible way. This is just an MVP right now, but thanks for your suggestion (which I agree with)

Adding a small delay after someone types a letter and before the API is hit would improve it a bit in the meantime. Also use history.replaceState so you don't add so many entries to the browser history.

Every time I type a letter (or each time I hit backspace), the browser fires off a dozen requests for the search term and all the images for every app in the result. This is a waste of bandwidth and bogs the browser down. I'm all for interactivity but you need to take usability into account a bit.

I like it a lot! The only thing that bothered me was how the star ratings show numbers instead of the stars, so I have to look carefully at the ratings before choosing an app.

With a star * rating the rating is visual, so I can easily see at a glance what the rating is.

Thanks for your comment. I've flip-flopped a bit on that issue, you may be right.

Way better than the built in app store search, however I can't see the titles of the apps only the search terms.

I suspect what you are seeing are the titles - but the nature of Apple's search encourages App developers to stuff their titles with keywords.

This seems working super fast! If you dont mind can we know your tech stack?

P.S awesome work.

It's Ember.js on the front end talking to an Algolia API. It's all proxied via CloudFlare, so very few requests hit our server (at Heroku)

Great job!

Do you plan on making it a real app for iOS ? Will Apple allow it on AppStore ?

I seem to remember seeing somewhere that it wouldn't be allowed. I'll need to research it further to get a definitive answer - it would seem sensible to make an app version if it was allowed.

You could make it usable as a "web clip", i.e. an bookmark that you can add to your home screen.

Good idea!

The back buttons broken :[

It's not exactly 'broken'. When you go to the home page it geolocates you, and then forwards you to the correct home page for your location. Admittedly it then makes it feel a bit broken...

use window.history.replaceState to redirect them instead, it'll replace the original entry in the browser history and avoid that problem.

Putting my browser in a state where the back button doesn't let me leave the site is the definition of breaking the back button. Worse than those back button pop-ups that only fire once (this is like a popup that fires every time). Definitely check out window.history.replaceState as mh- suggests.

It should be fixed now.

It should be fixed now. Can you check?

Hey OP, some feedback:

Both our apps appear as top results when "LoyLap" is typed into App Store search. In your results only our merchant app appears when queried with "LoyLap".

It should be there now. I think there is an edge case in the indexing logic that skipped your app last time. Marking as will fix...

Pretty nice! Can you search by app size? I seem to remember it was exposed by the API.

We can add that if you think it'd be a useful feature?

Where did you get the data from? Or is it just recent submissions/updates?

how would you get recent submissions/updates data ?

There are also RSS feeds one can collect.

There's a number of sources that need to be stitched together. The official Apple sources are

- iTunes search API: https://www.apple.com/itunes/affiliates/resources/documentat...

- Apple's Enterprise Partner feed: https://www.apple.com/itunes/affiliates/resources/documentat...

Does app store has some api? Or did you scrap them?

looks like a copy of http://fnd.io

fnd.io talks directly to Apple's search API (which is one of our sources). What fnd.io does not let you do is filter results by all the criteria we provide (we consider that our main USP). e.g you can't find pay once games on fnd.io like this: https://appapp.io/us/genre=Games;has_iap=false;price=%3E=0.9...

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