[vanelsas]

At Zwapp (I am the founder) we've actually attempted to address this issue, and yes, we use users and their social networks to see if we can make more apps discoverable than just the top popular lists. So far it seems to work out really well, people are interested in sharing their apps and providing each other recommendations. You see this in real life all the time. We meet up, put our phones on the table, and often the conversation is lead to "what apps do you use". We try to stimulate and support these types of conversations. There are more reasons why this approach is valid. Gaming reviews is less important because you wil trust a review of a person you know. It may be more interesting to see the most popular apps of your friends instead of the most popular in the app store. And finally, we have spend a lot of effort trying to provide excellent app detection. The reason for this is two-fold. it helps you get started quickly as a user, but more importantly it helps us to understand what apps people have and use, allowing us to provide qualitative recommendations. It is better to get a few users to download your app and then really use it, then get a whole lot of users downloading it and running it once because of a mismatch.

[semilshah]

Cool. Are there examples of folks using Zwapp to reach the same number of downloads as being featured by Apple, ro something close to it?

[vanelsas]

There is Zwapp, the community, and there is Zwapp Connect, our service that helps developers reach the users that are actually interested in their app. We use our recommendation engine to match between user needs and app to drive downloads. We've tried several app download services and found the quality of the downloads very poor. By using a lot of social/app and meta data that we have build up we can target much better and help devs to drive downloads to people that are more likely to use your app. (sorry about the pitch). It is actually a tough problem to crack that involves reach, matching tons of data, providing the right call to actions and then measure the success and improve the process again.

[semilshah]

Cool, there are also some iOS apps explicitly for "app discovery," but I still think it's impossible to break out. I read somewhere that 4% of app downloads account for about 3/4 of all app revenues.

[vanelsas]

Zwapp is one of those app discovery apps. And it is a platform for developers wanting to promote their apps to passionate app users. See : http://itunes.apple.com/app/id426360184?mt=8&ls=1