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Nearing 25 Billion Downloads, Apple Buys Chomp to Get Out of Its Tr-App-ic Jam

This article is more than 10 years old.

Apple's App Store is a victim of its own success. Clocking more than 550,000 apps and approaching an astounding 25 billion apps downloaded, the iOS marketplace is suffering from a lack of surface area. Simply put, "app discovery" in the App Store is a nightmare.

What's the world's most valuable company to do? Given their $100 billion cash hoard, acquisitions make a lot of sense. And in fact it was announced yesterday that Apple is buying Chomp, a leading app comparison app, for a reported $50 million. According to their website, "Chomp's proprietary algorithm learns the functions and topics of apps, so you can search based on what apps do, not just what they’re called." Given that the fastest way to find something on the App Store currently is to actually know the name of what you're looking for, this could be a good thing.

Apps represent a particularly gnarly taxonomy problem. Not only do all of the normal categorical complexities of subject matter apply, just like in books, movies or music, but apps also have functions, they do things. So to take in all of what apps are, you have to overlay the hierarchy of what they are about with the hierarchy of what they do (or do not do).

Before looking at the bottlenecks in the current app store—and how Chomp could help—it's worth noting that currently Chomp covers android apps too, so taking the service away from the Android Marketplace could be an equally important part of the strategy here.

And just to make things interesting, let me introduce a new entry to the app comparison category with a radically different (and arguably superior) discovery design called App Meister. App Meister, just launched by a team of young German geeks from Freiburg, takes user review data and turns it into side by side comparisons between apps with three variable dimensions: price, design and features. Admittedly, Chomp has a two year head start and has a massive database of user ratings beyond their algorithmically generated data. So I am presenting App Meister more as a sketch of advanced functionality (and potential future Apple acquisition) than as a robust alternative to Chomp.

Let's look at the ways to find what you are looking for on the App Store and compare them to the options available on Chomp and App Meister:

Featured:

App Store: Apple uses the "Featured" section to showcase 32 "New and Noteworthy" apps and 32 "What's Hot" apps. They also surface 8 additional tiles for individual apps or collections on their iPhone store and many more on their desktop and iPad versions. The larger screens also support some additional showcases: a wildcard (currently "Slam Dunk Apps" about basketball) and "Staff Favorites." All in all, the iPhone execution of the App Store highlights 80 featured apps/collections and the desktop execution about 125. These highlighted apps represent a pure editorial and marketing discretion on Apple's part. Apple also uses them to balance out the representation of the categories, since the data driven sections tend to skew towards games. The mobile version adds a "Genius" tab that recommends apps based on apps you already have, but without a way to to focus the recommendations this is of negligible utility.

Chomp: The desktop version of the app features apps on it's home page based (as best I can determine) by a combination of number of rankings and overall rating. You can page through 481,290 apps this way, but clearly they don't intend you to. The iPhone app version has tiles and tabs for highlighted collections that change periodically and do represent some editorial and marketing judgement calls. Unlike Apple though, their tabs seem oriented to serendipitous discovery instead of pure marketing. This morning the top three are "persian," "musical instruments," and "game for brain"—I didn't know I needed a Persian app!

App Meister: Currently just a web app (no native iOS version yet), and their surfacing is quite simple: six "Featured comparisons," six "Popular rankings," and six "Active users." It must be said that their initial featured content seems to favor German app producers, but that obviously isn't intrinsic to their product design.

Categories

App Store: The "Categories" tab is where the real bottleneck occurs for Apple. Apps are divided into 21 categories with no subcategories. On the iPhone execution you are limited to sorting by "Top Paid," "Top Free," and "Release Date." The desktop execution adds featured slots for 20 "New" apps and 120 "What's Hot" apps and allows you to sort all apps in the category by name or release date. What's clear in both cases (but more critically when shopping for apps on the iPhone itself) is that these are all "inside-out" discovery methods (to use Luke Wroblewski's term). They come from what Apple is offering in the App Store, not what people are looking for.

Chomp: The desktop interface has a dropdown for the same 21 categories as the App Store, but the apps are organized in the same type of stream as the featured flow on the home page. It feels like a curated stream though clearly algorithmically generated. On the iPhone app you need to search for the category name (more on that below), but assuming you use the identical name you get a similar flow of apps. It seems that the mobile version has more apps indexed than the desktop, so a search of "Books" on the app gets 64,989 apps when the drop down category on the desktop show only 49,342. (Obviously, Chomp may tag things differently than Apple, but even on a selection of "all categories" on the desktop Chomp returns only 481,290 apps though it tells you it is "Searching 565,873 apps" on iOS.) But super helpful within the search for "books," Chomp returns five additional subcategories, "phone book," "book reader," travel guides," "audio books" and "reading."

App Meister: Instead of categories, App Meister has an alphabetical list of "rankings" based on categories. These ranking correspond roughly with the level of specificity of Chomp's subcategories. The downside is that if the category of ranking you are looking for does not already exist, your only option is to create a new ranking, for which you have to create a login and actually start comparing the apps yourself! Because of the small amount of content on the site (it launched less than 2 weeks ago) it is as much of a community building site as a service at his point, but that balace will shift if they achieve a critical mass of reviews.

Top 25

App Store: Pure data-driven visibility has been the largest flow of discovery on the App Store. Not only does this make downloads and sales skew viral (the popular get more so, etc.) but it has led to nefarious techniques for gaming the system. According to a story on InformationWeek, "One of the more popular ways to get an app noticed is to pay a marketing company to download the app enough times that it ranks in an iTunes App Store Top 10 chart. After that, thousands of people see the app, and the fake popularity becomes real popularity. But Apple frowns on the practice. 'Even if you are not personally engaged in manipulating App Store chart rankings or user reviews, employing services that do so on your behalf may result in the loss of your Apple Developer Program membership,' Apple warned developers in early February."

Chomp: On its iOS app, Chomp has a home page tile for 100 trending apps, but like their general rankings stream, this seems generated from multiple factors, not just sales or downloads.

App Meister: Visibility is based on activity on the site, which theoretically should correlate with what people are actually interested in (i.e, "outside-in" methods of discovery). But again, at present, the visibility tells you what App Meister has, not necessarily what you are looking for.

Search

App Store: Apple has a completely straight forward one dimensional search mechanism. You can search for whatever you want, but the less precision you use for the key words the less useful the results. The auto complete options in the search box are mainly for the titles of popular apps as opposed to meaningful subcategories. And the search results display as five small slices with an icon, company name, title, rating and price. There is no indication why the results are in a certain order or how long the selected list of apps runs. So most people search, look at the first few and then search again, often defaulting to the autofill suggestions which just reinforces the already popular apps.

Chomp: The search feature is really where Chomp shines. The autofill suggestions are mainly for useful subcategories and even after you complete a search, helpful alternative terms appear right below the search box. Most importantly, the search results return the same app flow as the other functions on the site, so you see (in the iOS version) a full screen representation of each app with a large screenshot. The screenshot tells you much more about the app than just the icon, and the ability to flip through the apps from left to right is quicker and more intuitive than scrolling down endlessly. And because the large screen shots are more predictive of which app you want to find out more about, there's less back and forth between content levels.

App Meister: There is App Store level search functionality for the apps that have not been rated on the site yet, but nifty Ajax response for those it has. For apps or categories in its database, it starts returning results after you type the first two characters. It's first default is to return categories of rankings as opposed to specific apps. Everything here reinforces the idea that you're wanting to compare similar apps.

So for their $50 million Apple is getting two year's worth of user rankings to add to their existing ratings and access to a battle-tested method of app discovery that is more efficient than what they currently have. All of the subcategorization provided by Chomp will create the much-needed surface area that Apple has been missing. This is great. Anything that allows users to get to the apps they are looking for more quickly will increase sales and satisfaction with the overall experience.

Chomp also seems to have a leg up on the social angle (Ping! anyone?). Wired's GadgetLab reports, "In Chomp, you can follow friends from Twitter and Facebook to check out what apps they’ve reviewed, lending a social aspect to app search. Given iOS 5′s heavy Twitter integration, a Chomp-driven App Store could let you see what your Twitter follows are saying about iOS apps in order to better help you make downloading decisions (and, you know, avoid that embarrassing feeling when you realize all of your friends are using a cool new app, and you’re the lame-o late adopter)."

This is an example where a company dedicated to a single function can evolve a better design over time than a larger entity with multiple levels of concern. But this process is never ending. If Chomp is better than the App Store now, and gets absorbed into it,  another company will come up with a still better method that is able to achieve scale, and it in turn will become an acquisition target.

Will App Meister be that company in a year or two? Hard to say. What it has going for it is that its functions are genuinely user-centric (i.e., "outside-in")—they are about what someone is looking for, not merely descriptive of what is on offer. Are price, design and features necessarily the best variables to use? Here I have a bit of a question. I don't immediately question "price" and "number of features," but "design" is a bit of a loaded term. If the reviewers on App Meister truly use design in the larger sense meaining the design of the whole product, than yes. But many people speak of design referring only to the visual, to the graphics of the interface. In mobile experiences speed, the efficiency of the flow of information or play through the app, is much more important than the visuals, and a critical part of their design. So unless there's a way to make that distinction clear, I would suggest either substituting "performance" for design as one of the axes, or adding a fourth dimension and dividing "design" into "interface" and "performance."

The larger question for App Meister or any other candidate to be the next Chomp is how to achieve scale. Only by being fairly comprehensive do these services become useful, and at 565,873 apps and counting, that's a very ambitious undertaking.