Review our startup: AppStoreHQ -- Mobile app search/discovery
appstorehq.com
appstorehq.com
Hoping to get some feedback on our new site. We've been launched for a bit now, and are finally ready to start showing off to the world. Hopefully you'll have some comments, especially if you're an app developer.
We're working on mobile app search and discovery, since we believe the app store is far too hit driven. We want to make finding the perfect app easy. And, as a developer, we want you to be able to market and distribute your app more effectively.
We've done some things that I think are pretty interesting. Here's a quick run-down:
1) "Hottest Apps" -- We index many different blogs that review apps and any review they write gets linked to from our site. Then we use that as an input to create a list of what apps are currently the hottest. We also publish the most talked about apps to our Twitter account (http://twitter.com/appstorehq).
2) Sponsored Results -- App developers can purchase sponsored results for any category. Right now they're $10/week or $35/month.
3) Saving Apps to your Amazon Universal Wish List -- If you want to remember an app, but don't want to buy it yet, you can save it to your Amazon Wish List and come back to buy it later.
4) App badges for your site -- You can embed a badge on any site and write a review of an app. We'll find that review (because you embedded the badge) and we'll link to it from the app's detail page. It gives your visitors up-to-date information about the app, and gives you more traffic. A win-win, we think.
5) Search filters -- we think we have the best all around mobile app search on the web now. You can drill down by any combination of Search Query, Category, Price Range, and Rating. Soon we'll be adding Release Date to that as well.
Overall, we're really trying to help app developers with app distribution (and other problems) and help app consumers find the right apps. So, if you have any suggestions, please let us know!
We're also testing the waters with white-label search. For example, if you run a blog which talks about mobile apps, we'd provide a white-label version of our index and share any revenue you provide... If you'd be interested in something like this, let us know.
So yeah, you have to at least have gotten some traction somewhere to get into the stream, but the bar is pretty low. (That said, about half the apps in the App Store have never even received a user rating - they're still in AppStoreHQ's search results, but they'll need a little love to get out of the basement).
If you can get people to enter which apps they have, you could do some sort of recommendation engine. IE People who used this app also liked this one...
http://www.freshapps.com http://www.apptism.com http://iphone.iusethis.com
But yours is right in there in the mix. Add a recommendation engine, and you're really on to something. Good luck!
Found one issue: our app (Movies Now!) is indicated as being released on May 13th. However it was actually released on the 27th May.