App Review: Appsaurus outsmarts App Store Genius
December 31st, 2009
After much clamoring and begging from everyone who owns an iPhone, Apple finally released a Genius tool for finding apps on the iPhone in September. Like its predecessor for music libraries, Genius is supposed to make recommendations for downloading other apps based on the user’s currently owned apps. Even though it’s a step up for surfing through the thousands of apps in iTunes, it’s not as helpful of a tool as it could be.
Enter: Appsaurus. The new “thesaurus for iPhone apps” helps those in search of apps find them with customized searches and also with an amazingly efficient favoriting and recommendations feature. The developers of a small start-up have been working on this app for much of 2009 and finally released it this past Monday. And after using Appsaurus for just a few days, I can confidently say the app is going to help iPhone users start the new year off in a more efficient, streamlined way (when it comes to finding apps, anyway).
(Full Review After Jump)
Explore
The main feature lauded within the app is the “Explore” feature, which recommends apps based on your previous picks. You have to spend a little time starting the app out, training it, if you will, before the magic really starts to happen.
Appsaurus shows a list of five apps for you to choose from. Tap the arrow on the right to see more details about the app, then make your selection of which app on the list appeals to you more by tapping it. This brings you to another list of apps that Appsaurus would recommend for you, based on your previous choice. The more “exploring” you do, the more accurate the recommendations are to what you’re looking for.
Although I don’t think this is the most amazing part of Appsaurus (we’ll get there in a minute), I was incredibly pleased with the recommendations the app gave me, based on my selections. Although a lot of the recommendations were for apps I already have (talk about accurate, right?), a lot of the apps that I ended up interested in were ones I hadn’t heard of, and I immediately downloaded them from the App Store (Hint: You can do this by tapping the link in the app details in Appsaurus). There were a few instances when I didn’t see any apps that appealed to me, so I used the “Nothing Here?” option to tap out and reload a new list, even though this isn’t encouraged (the pickier you are, the more difficult it is for Appsaurus to give your accurate recommendations).
Also within the Explore tab is the option to “favorite” or “block” certain apps from your recommendations. If you see an app that you never want to see in your list again, swipe that app to the right and you unveil a star icon and a skull and crossbones icon. Tap the skull and crossbones to “ban” that app from your views.
Favoriting apps while you’re exploring also helps Appsaurus get very specific with your app recommendations. Tap the star icon to favorite an app, and the app will then show up in your Favorites tab.
Favorites
When you add an app to your Favorites list, Appsaurus then gives you the option to select that app and see more apps like that specific one. When I asked to see more apps like my “’stachetastic” camera app, Appsaurus pulled up a list of camera apps similar to that one.
This list was again pretty accurate in finding me what I was looking for in a camera app, and this feature could come in very handy for getting down to specifics in app searches.
Appsaurus doesn’t sync the apps you already own to the app, so you have to manually add any apps you have and like to your Favorites list if you’d like recommendations based on them. It’s a fairly easy process with a search tool in the Favorites tab, but it’s also tedius and unnecessary. Thank goodness the developers have said an update to let users sync downloaded apps is coming soon.
Custom
I said earlier that the Explore feature isn’t the most amazing part of the app—that’s the Custom feature, which gives iPhone app enthusiasts exactly what they’ve been missing from the App Store all these years: an efficient search tool that lets you get specific. Really specific.
Appsaurus provides you with a few examples of some customized searches you can do for apps (<$2 Music Apps, Chess Games, Free Apps), but by adding a new search, you can find just about anything you’re looking for. Tap the “+” button at the top right corner of the screen, then give your search a name. You can select criteria by categories (the same categories App Store uses to sort apps), maxium price, and keywords. I went with a Twitter Client search, and although it took a little longer than I anticipated to come up with results (the rest of the app runs very quickly), the recommendations all fit my criteria.
This customized search feature is something that could very well change how app users view the iPhone app experience, as well as even the iPhone. Many of us can’t stand to go through the torture of sifting through trashy apps to find some quality apps that fill all of our needs and wants, but this feature in Appsaurus seems to cut out the middleman (iTunes?) to finally give us what we’ve been needing from the App Store since its inception.
Recap & Conclusion
Price: $0.99
Released: December 28
Our Grade: A
I was a bit skeptical about how different this app would be from the App Store’s Genius tool, but I was pleasantly surprised at both how easy it was to “train” Appsaurus to understand what I liked and also how fantastic the recommendations were, in return. Not only does the app do its job of recommending you apps based on your taste, but the recommendations all seem to be quality apps that have been screened or reviewed by the developers themselves. Being an app reviewer, the customized search feature is going to be a lifesaver for me, but for the everyday app user, it’s still going to save the day when the App Store starts giving you grief. Save yourself some time (and some money, instead of buying apps that don’t work) by downloading this immediately.
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