StumbleUpon launches App Discovery on Android, trips over clumsy interface
StumbleUpon's been serving up crowdsourced, personalized website recommendations since the turn of the century with the simple idea that like-minded surfers will enjoy the same stuff, and if that sounds like a fantastic formula for recommending apps, then you're in a spot of luck. StumbleUpon's bringing App recommendations to Android today as part of an update to its app, and we have to say, the program's got some potential if it catches on.
As with all crowdsourced software, StumbleUpon's not terribly good at its job right off the bat and a moderately unresponsive UI (with tiny touchscreen buttons) doesn't really help, but the app presently pulls from a set of existing Android app databases that give it a nice head start.
After you log in with your StumbleUpon ID, it asks you if it can (a la AppBrain) take a look at the existing apps on your phone, after which point it displays likely correlations one by one (complete with descriptions, screenshots and Android Market star ratings) for you to vote up or down. We got quite a few flashlights, soundboards and fart machines, mind you, but most everything we saw had plenty of ratings and at least four stars, and a good number of our favorites (and some probable soon-to-be-favorites) popped up as well, and voting up and down app concepts is an amusing diversion in and of itself. Sadly, it doesn't use your existing StumbleUpon topic preferences to recommend apps, but it will hopefully align them to your tastes soon, assuming that enough folks can look past the iffy UI long enough to help their fellows and give the free app a go. PR after the break.
Update: It's on the Android Market right now -- find it at our source link, or use the handy-dandy QR code at right. %Gallery-106706%
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StumbleUpon Brings Personalized App Discovery to Android
Find Mobile Apps Tailored to Your Individual Interests
SAN FRANCISCO – November 4, 2010 – StumbleUpon, a discovery engine, today announced StumbleUpon App Discovery, a free beta feature of the StumbleUpon Android app that suggests mobile apps based on each user's individual interests and preferences and those of friends and like-minded users. The feature allows users to browse, or "stumble," through recommended apps on their Android phones.
"Currently, discovering apps from the over 100,000 apps available in the Android Market is limited to keyword-based search features," said Garrett Camp, StumbleUpon CEO and co-founder. "With StumbleUpon App Discovery, users can now find applications that are personally recommended to them and in many cases would previously have gone unnoticed."
StumbleUpon App Discovery is included in the free StumbleUpon mobile app for Android. Using StumbleUpon's personalized recommendation technology, StumbleUpon considers each user's app preferences, as well as those of a user's friends and like-minded users, to recommend specific apps. Users simply click "Install" to download any app discovered through StumbleUpon.
To try the free StumbleUpon Apps Discovery feature, download the StumbleUpon mobile app for Android by visiting the Android Market on your phone and searching for "StumbleUpon." Current users of the StumbleUpon mobile app for Android can expect an automatic product update.
About StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon is a discovery engine that finds the best of the web, recommended for each user. With more than 15 billion stumbles to date, more than 12 million users and 600 million personalized recommendations per month, StumbleUpon is the leading way to discover great, peer-sourced content on the Internet. More than 50,000 advertisers are using StumbleUpon to promote their products and services. Founded in 2001, StumbleUpon is based in San Francisco and backed by some of the same investors behind Google and Facebook. For more information, visit www.StumbleUpon.com.
