The team at Xyo – formerly Xyologic – have spent many months working to improve how we search for apps. To that end, they have used their recommendation engine expertise to launch Apps for Me; a kind of ‘Google Now for apps’, it’s the first service allowing users to check out suggestions based on their Facebook likes.
You can search for specific apps as well as app types based on your interests and those of your friends (according to what you ‘Like’ on Facebook). The algorithm allows the platform to find apps based on those interests – providing an initial recommendation that doesn’t need any previous knowledge.
The idea behind Xyo, according to Xyo co-founder Matthaus Krzykowski, is that with an increasing proportion of Internet usage now via mobile, the traditional search box is giving way to recommendation-based discovery meaning that “the future is much more ‘Google Now’ and less ‘Google’.”
Matthaus, who introduced Apps for Me in public at the Berlin Tech Meetup last month, added: “It’s amazing how rich app stores truly are – there are hundreds of app interests, not only a few dozen categories as app stores suggest.”
The platform makes your friends’ app interests visible in your search results, and displays the friends most likely to be interested in a long tail of more than 600 types of app and 120 types of game.
Matthaus’ fellow co-founder and Xyo CEO Zoe Adamovicz revealed the service had proven popular since being launched as a feature in closed beta three weeks ago. She said: “When I see the face of a friend in a search result for eBooks apps, my personal relationship with him or her makes me more curious to explore this app interest further.” The idea is to provoke conversation and sharing between friends, and Zoe added: “We make the app store’s long tail discoverable for our users.”
Finding that long tail means avoiding the pitfalls of traditional app stores – that 10 percent of apps get 90 percent of downloads. That is down to the fact that most users rely on the ‘top shelf’ – ‘Top Charts’ or ‘Featured’, for example – to find new apps.
Xyo has been looking to change that since 2012, launching its first product in August of that year. The company is backed by investors including Signia Venture Partners, Flaregames CEO Klaas Kersting and SoundCloud co-founder Eric Wahlforss.