Discovering great apps is like finding a needle in a
manure pile. The App Stores are overrun with crap, and anything decent
has a dozen clones. But AppCrawlr lets you compare feature checklists and reviews to find the best app for any purpose.
While a genius technology, AppCrawlr’s two-man operation
never became a household name. So today, AppCrawlr announced it’s been
acquired by desktop software discovery site Softonic,
which is trying to get serious about mobile. Both founders are coming
aboard, and for now AppCrawlr will keep running as its own site while
its tech is built into Softonic, but eventually it may be shut down.
I first caught wind of AppCrawlr at SXSW 2013 when it’s
co-founder David Schorr came to a TechCrunch Office Hours session to
meet and pitch writers. I was blown away by what he’d built.
AppCrawlr doesn’t just put apps into generic categories.
It crunches reviews and release notes to determine exactly what an app
does, what it’s best and worst for, and whether it’s the best app of its
kind. You can filter by use cases like “Helps you: earn money”, “meet
new friends”, “fall asleep”, and more. It’s a true semantic search
engine for apps, and we need it more than ever.
With millions of apps to choose from, and install ads
ever-present on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, it’s tough to
know what to trust.
AppCrawlr’s review-scraping big data engine can’t always
tell the difference between features and descriptions, sometimes
labeling “Super Fun” as a function of a photo editing app alongside
“filter options”. The design is a bit amateur as well. But it gives a
much deeper understanding of an app’s purpose, people’s most and least
favorite things about it, stability, alternatives, and related apps.
To get this utility to the masses, though, AppCrawlr
needed the nearly two-decade old Softonic’s help. Co-founder Joel Fisher
tells me “to grow globally and to apply the technology to its full
potential, it was very compelling for us to join a larger company that
has both the resources and the shared vision to make a much bigger
impact.” Now Softonic is in the process of building AppCrawlr’s
functionality into its desktop software discovery site.
“Softonic has over 100 million monthly users who come to
our service looking for desktop software and mobile apps to solve a
problem or enhance their lives” the company’s corporate marketing
director Diana Castelltort tells me. “Over time, we expect a continued
shift from desktop to mobile and our products and services will reflect
this change.” AppCrawlr will make that happen smarter and faster.
With everyone aware of the app discovery problem, you’d
think startups would be flooding into the space. But there’s been
surprisingly little innovation on pure app comparison and discovery
since Apple acquired review site Chomp…and
then basically did nothing with it. Install ads, Product Hunt, and
contextual homescreens like Aviate and Everything.me are all taking
different angles to solve the problem.
But with AppCrawlr on its side, old school desktop player Softonic could show these n00bs how it’s done.