AppsFire.com ★ blog ★

discover and share apps on ★ fire ★

AppsFire reborn: introducing the best way to discover great apps!

We launched Appsfire last summer, while we were thinking of this service a a nice feature missing in the App Store. But since the service has grown, the discovery experience for mobile is becoming critical and we became a company early this year.

We spent all this time obsessively thinking about how to provide the best discovery experience and came to the conclusion that browsing fast through your existing social graph (for now Facebook) was a good start (but it will not be the only one)

After many weeks of hard work, we are happy to introduce today a brand new way to discover apps and share them like never before. A very intuitive, fast and visual experience. An video is better than an explanation.

We are also introducing a 1 click sharing experience that you should enjoy and which is providing a great experience for reading and engaging for your followers

We also totally rebuilt our iPhone app, coming out very soon, providing an even better experience. More on that soon.

For now check out our new site and our new sync, super fast client to enjoy best AppsFire

Discovery principle #1: Discovery should be fast

As hopefully Appsfire brand new version we ll be soon approved by Apple, we re going to take this free-space time to regularly explain you what we understand by discovery. We spend 100% of our time obsessively thinking about it and we have a few insights we'd like to share and certainly apply in all the products we are going to roll out. 


We believe everything remains to be done. We are in the infancy of discovery for applications. Although a lot has been done in other fields, like music (think Pandora, Last.fm) or movies (Netflix) or books (Amazon) nothing substantial has been done in apps yet although many players are trying in their own way to solve that issue

It may sound arrogant, but we believe we are at stage zero of app discovery. In a few days we'll roll out the very first bricks of our platform, a few of them are really innovative (maybe too) and have never been tried in the past. We hope they will get adopted since we built them trying to think of the pain a user has to go through when it comes to find relevant apps

A few principles are guiding us. The most important: Speed. Discovery should not take time.

Discovery is an on going repetitive process. It takes place every day, several time a day. But the majority of users don't care enough about apps to spend hours looking for them. Users care about using apps. but not about searching for them

This is why in everything we build we have "speed" in mind. Most people don't have time to read long reviews, or browse though endless list of apps or even ratings. Even if filtered.

The experience of discovery should be very fast. In such a way that the pain itself of spending time in searching and in finding goes away and gives the desire to iterate on that process again.

  • Appsfire 2.0 (as we call it) is built to help you spend as less time as possible on our app. We don't want you to spend time on it. We want you to love it enough to use it every day several times a day, because it is fast and brings you relevant app insights fast
  • Speed also means that the access to the relevant filters is obvious and immediate. This is why we give you at hand all the necessary tools to cut through the App Store and find your way quickly
  • Speed also means that the process of installing your app on your phone should be as fast as possible. More on that very soon. But something uber-cool is coming

In one word, AppsFire wants you to find cool apps for you FAST.

ps: btw the screenshot is one of a really cool app to measure the speed of your internet access. SpeedTest.net

Discover apps like never before: a first a preview of the new Appsfire iPhone app

We usually like to showcase other great apps, but today we re giving a preview of our new App :)

We ve tried to come with something which is really unique and hopefully you ll like the way this app will let you discover new relevant apps for you but browsing the app or comparing them with your friends like never before. We also put a lot of effort in the design to make it look as great as the best apps out there. 

We just submitted it to Apple, and hopefully it should be out there very soon 

This is just the very first brick of the big wall we are building!

This video preview  (totally improvised, including the bug....) was made by Robert Scoble

Do you like it?

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Apple hiring people to help users discover cool apps. Apple work with us!

Apple is taking the App store business seriously and, it makes us really happy because we believe the App Store deserves to be better served. In the key positions they are hiring, they want to help users discover apps in a new way.

If someone from Apple is reading this post: Hire all the key talents, but also work with outside people like us! we focus 100% on bringing a relevant experience to discovery. We brought in the "Top grossing chart" before it was even in the App Store. We brought App Sharing on Twitter and Facebook, before it was on the App Store and many more things. So much more is coming that could potentially be a game changer and accelerate the discovery of relevant apps for each one.

Apple, work with us! 

Rob Glaser, Real Networks CEO, on mobile discovery

The industry needs to make discovery easy, which means once people have access to digital content, they need to be able to find their stuff and new stuff they will like using semantic data.
via gigaom.com

Thank you Rob :)

Everything is in little details: new, now AppsFire VIPS automatically presented according to your country

You may have not noticed the change, but we are now presenting VIPs according to the country from where you are browsing.

If you live in France, you'll see now first VIPs from France then the others.

This should add more relevance to your discovery experience, as you ll immediately relate to people leaving in your country. 

This is a little step in a long list of steps coming. 

Hope you like it

ps: yesterday we asked the question on twitter but no one really noticed :)

AppMix: Discover the best apps to discover music

Apple just released a selection of 10 apps for discovering music. But 2 important one are missing: TuneWiki and Deezer. We've added them in the selection below (here if you're reading from RSS). Of course this selection is also part of our Mixes on AppsFire new site

 

 

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★ AppsFire is heating up with a first round of funding!

Today we are thrilled to announce that we just closed our first round of financing with some of the best and most successful web entrepreneurs in Europe. 

Namely we are proud to receive support from Marc Simoncini (meetic CEO), Xavier Niel (Iliad/Free CEO), Jacques-Antoine Granjon (Vente-Privee CEO), Jean-David Blanc (founded Allocine.com sold to Vivendi - the Europe IMDB and recently invested in Square). A-level investors.


AppsFire is a French company with split operations between France and Israel but our reach is worldwide. Our investors built very successful businesses from France with international reach. This should be inspiring to us.

When we first started AppsFire, we had no idea that this simple idea would become a full-time operation with proper funding. Everything we did so far was done with very little time and resources. Starting today, things are going to change and this is rather a good news for us but mainly for you our readers and users.

Since we launched AppsFire, we generated more than 10 million app recommendations and download intents. Those recommendations converted into hundreds of thousands of clicks and the pace is accelerating lately at a very significant speed. We also launched an app built in 10 days that reach the App store top rankings for which a new version is coming very soon.

We are aware that AppsFire was a great experiment so far, meaning it was far from perfect. We are now equipped with the means to bring you the most innovative platform for mobile apps discovery; we are hiring today to that effect! 

What it means specifically is that nearly everything that you are seeing today is going to change. A new iPhone app will come soon, new discovery mechanisms, breakthrough features and tools, extending Appsfire to new OSes and not just the iPhone/iPad. Oh and did you notice our refreshed website?  (thanks to Nicolas Dengler for the graphical design)

We firmly believe that mobile apps is one of  the next new big things (do we need to convince you?) and that they (whether desktop or web based) will be the format of choice for consuming the internet and content on the go. We also believe that the app discovery issue, a critical one, has not yet been cracked. As users, we remain frustrated despite the large range of attempted solutions out there, and despite Apple's efforts that are clearly going in the right direction. We are frustrated even with our own solution!  

So in short, the challenge is exciting. In the meantime we want to thank you all, our users, for your support and love. We would not have been where were are today without you.

Keep watching this space for upcoming updates. And keep spreading the love for us! Thanks. Ouriel & Yann.


update: TechCrunch has a post on the funding

 

iPhone app discovery: how it is approached today, online. Full map and observations

We like to map the complex iPhone ecosystem (we did it for analytics and app creation), because it is important for us to understand where we move. One of the key issues of the iPhone world is app discovery: finding the right apps for you.

 

It is an issue for both developers and users. 

iTunes is doing a decent job at organizing the app catalog but, let's face it, the browsing experience, the absence of internal marketing channel to the App Store and the explosion of the number of apps (will reach 300/500k by year end) is making the discovery and relevancy of the process painful. 

This is then, no surprise that lots of services and companies are trying to solve that issue. We wanted to map those players and although Appsfire has not really started implementing what we are planning (this is called a teaser - more on that later), we also find ourselves in that map. 

There it is (click to zoom). Note we put aside the App store/Google and the blogosphere/TwitterSphere that plays an important part too. We focused here only on services that specifically aim at solving the discovery of mobile apps for the iPhone

What we can learn from this map is that the attention of iPhone users is split between many sorts of discovery opportunities from the most traditional (app catalogs like AppStore HQ) to the most complex (Flurry is an example), from personal initiatives (like appstore-appstot.com) to funded startups (a bunch in our map). And none has really taken the lead to mainstream although some have reached a decent size already (like AppstoreHQ)

App discovery is far from being solved. All those players, Apple included and soon many more players like Google/Android, Mobile operators, probably some publishers, will try to bring their own solution. This is a very hard problem to solve correctly. We tried ourselves with a few discovery mechanisms from which we learned a lot and gave us the vision for our next steps.

One more thing to mention is that the discovery of Apps for many users does not take place online. It takes place offline, while discussing and comparing apps with friends. Apps are the new playlists and the new mobile glue. People like to talk about them in real life. If you have an iPhone you know what we mean. And this part cannot be underestimated
This is definitely a hot space and one that requires monitoring.

Joe Hewitt, ex-Facebook iphone app creator, on the App Store app discovery [video]

via gigaom.com

Joe has created one of the most popular iPhone app. He just decided not to pursue this app because he's against Apple app review process and approach. Fine. Someone else is taking the lead. It is probably a big deal for a complex app like Facebook. I am sure Apple will improve it over time.

But in this video interview at the very end (jump to 8min) he says something highly interesting about the App discovery issue.

"I hope Apple is goingt to come with some solution for app discovery. If not Apple then some sort of third party infrastructure..."

Joe [smile!] welcome to Appsfire