
Show HN: AppApp.io – A better search for the iOS App Store - dansingerman
https://appapp.io
======
speedyapoc
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).

~~~
dansingerman
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.

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

~~~
dansingerman
That's a great idea.

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dansingerman
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-...](http://blog.appapp.io/post/131747237960/the-raison-detre-of-appappio)

~~~
MCRed
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.

~~~
dansingerman
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.

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ambivalence
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.

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

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

------
mbrock
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.

~~~
dansingerman
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.

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

~~~
dansingerman
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)

~~~
nacs
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.

------
greenwalls
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.

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

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

~~~
dansingerman
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.

------
techaddict009
This seems working super fast! If you dont mind can we know your tech stack?

P.S awesome work.

~~~
dansingerman
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)

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codeshaman
Great job!

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

~~~
dansingerman
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.

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

~~~
dansingerman
Good idea!

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cjstewart88
The back buttons broken :[

~~~
dansingerman
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...

~~~
rgbrgb
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.

~~~
dansingerman
It should be fixed now.

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s_dev
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".

~~~
dansingerman
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...

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

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

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

~~~
misiti3780
how would you get recent submissions/updates data ?

~~~
coldcode
There are also RSS feeds one can collect.

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techaddict009
Does app store has some api? Or did you scrap them?

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hmage
looks like a copy of [http://fnd.io](http://fnd.io)

~~~
dansingerman
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...](https://appapp.io/us/genre=Games;has_iap=false;price=%3E=0.99/search)

