A Web Of Apps

i'm not convinced that app discoverability is a problem that needs to be solved. yes, there are 600K iOS apps and most of them are dying in obscurity. but that's a good thing. most of those apps are utter garbage and deserve to be obscure.

good, useful apps do not have a discoverability problem. it isn't hard to find the evernote app. i go to their website and get a link to it, or i type it in to the search box in the market. it is much more difficult to find an evernote rip-off, but why would i want to do that?

i find the list of obscure startup names tackling the app discovery problem to be fairly telling. if i've never heard of your discovery service, i won't be discovering much on it. they need to solve their own discovery problem before they attempt to solve anybody else's.

I think there are at least 2 big areas for innovation around app discoverability: social + location-based. Social refers to being able to easily find out what apps your friends or people you trust are using. As with most other behaviors, social has a big influence on what apps we may want to use. On the iOS, at least, innovation is partly blocked by iOS API that don't allow an app to enumerate all the apps that are currently installed.

For location-based discovery, imagine you go into Home Depot, and the app that lets you self scan in products and self check out automatically gets pushed down to you (or notifies you to be available). That sort of thing doesn't happen yet, and there is certainly opportunities for innovation.

Software discovery is an unsolved problem. Apps is just a particular part of the whole problem (an important one nevertheless).

This is particular bad for games. What is the best game? It really depends on the user taste. Sites like Kongregate apply usual recommendation algorithms to ease this, which, I believe, is a nice first step in the right direction[2].

[1] http://www.kongregate.com/

[2] http://venturebeat.com/2007/11/11/facebook-search-expands-wi...

URL Schemes (and intent filters) could be really useful if it was easier for developers to use. Launching another app with a URL scheme is simple if you know the URL but in order to do something useful the app you link to would need some sort of public API you can work with and pass data to.

The most visible, useful, example of URL schemes is Facebook SSO. When a user logs into your app using you Facebook credentials they are redirected to the Facebook app (or website) where it authorises your app and then uses your apps URL scheme to return the user back.