Dated Friday August 16, 2013
The App Store and the Google Play Store have surpased the magic number of a 50 billion downloaded apps. Having over 1.000.000 apps might have helped achieving that goal.
"There is an app for that"
Those where the magic words Steve Jobs used to promote the App Store. The convay the message that there would come a time that the App Store would have an app for each task you can imagine. And Steve Jobs was right. Steve Jobs was more then rIght. In fact, the slogan could be changed to "there are over a thousand apps for that".
Searching and discovering apps
And that is where the problem araises. How to find the best app? And that is where both app stores fail. Finding an app still is a mather of asking your friends for recommendations. That means not using the app store to discover to best app.
Are native apps the best answer for Android?
That searching and discovering is a problem in the Android Play Store is remarkable at least. Android is a product of the world leading search engine. Then why is Android not using the same engine for its Play Store? Because the Google Search Engine is build for a web of linked pages instead of thousands of seperate apps.
If Google would shift Androids focus from native apps to webapps it might solve this problem. Apps could again make use of that essential element Google loves so much: hyperlinks. And the app having the most links pointing to it is probably the most recomended app by others. In as such, having brought a truly working recommendation system into the Play Store. Because if this system works for billions of Google searches ervery day, it must do something right.
