App Smart: Searching for Apps Is Finally Getting Easier

Luckily, that didn’t happen.
As consumers increasingly migrate to mobile apps and developers fight to have their apps discovered in the chaos of the marketplace, app-related search engines and stores have vastly improved their support for both constituencies.
Apple users have seen some improvement, but Android is the much bigger story of the year because of upgrades to the Android Market, the emergence of the Amazon Appstore for Android (which sells only Android apps) and upgrades to existing services like Appolicious and Appbrain.com.
Of these developments, the polishing of the Android Market Web site is the most meaningful. The version of the Android Market offered on mobile devices was fairly good, but the Web version was a shallow, amateurish sampler that inexplicably offered users no way to search for apps.
Considering the fact that Android is owned by Google, it was a shockingly poor performance.
Google started fixing that problem in February by introducing search on the Market Web site and populating the Market with a big assortment of categories for browsing.
As the year progressed, the Market added editors’ picks, trending apps and spruced up the graphics, to the point where the service bears a passing resemblance to the iTunes App Store.
More recently, Google took a page from Amazon’s playbook by virtually giving away apps that, in some cases, were among the more popular and expensive in the Market. But instead of making this a pure giveaway, the Market is selling 10 apps daily for 10 cents apiece, thereby requiring customers to enter their credit card information.
That’s a line many prospective app buyers refuse to cross, either because of the inconvenience or because of fear that their financial information may somehow be compromised. But for apps like SoundHound Infinity and Minecraft — Pocket Edition (both regularly $7) and SwiftKey X Keyboard (regularly $4), the sale price is quite an enticement.
Unfortunately, Google last week still showed signs that it was not ready to rival Apple or Amazon