Chomp May Have Just Solved The Nightmare That Is Android App Search. Regardless of what you think about the Android platform, there’s no denying that the Market experience for finding apps is pretty poor.
And that’s putting it nicely. Google has evolved the experience over the years, and the web-based Market helps a lot. But on the phone, even with Gingerbread, it’s far from great. Today, Chomp, the app search engine, launches an experience for Android that is great. If you’ve heard of Chomp before, it was likely from their iPhone app, which focused on not only search but also personalized recommendations. “We found out that while early on, people enjoy the social stuff, it wasn’t very sticky and people weren’t returning to the service,” Keighran tells us.
Keighran gave me a demo last week of just how poor this experience currently is on Android’s Market. “We’ve developed the algorithm that really stands out on Android since search is so bad,” Keighran says. And when you do find the one you want, installing it is as simple as it is in the Market. Chomp Sinks Its Teeth Deeper Into Search; Wants To Be The Google Of Apps. It was last November that we first heard about Chomp, a sort-of Yelp for iPhone apps.
At the time, it was still very much in stealth mode, but we kept hearing they raised a seed round of funding from investors like Ron Conway insanely fast. Obviously, we were interested. By January, we had a sneak peak at the actual service. And about a week later, it formally launched as an app recommendation engine for Apple’s App Store. Another larger round of funding quickly followed, and since then Chomp has been off and running with over 400,000 active users at this point.
App discovery in the App Store still basically sucks. Of course, that’s what Chomp has been doing. Co-founder Ben Keighran calls this latest version of Chomp “the most personalized way to search and browse for apps.” Competitors like Appsfire are out there also doing search, but they’re also mainly title (and description) based. He also notes that they have more reviews in many cases than Apple itself does on apps.
Chomp’s iPhone app: brings mobile search into modern age. What's next in mobile?
Find out at MobileBeat, VentureBeat's 7th annual event on the future of mobile, on July 8-9 in San Francisco. Register now and save $400! Finally, it looks like searching for apps on your smartphone will go from a terrible experience to a pretty good one. Chomp, a website that recommends mobile applications, has just launched an app for the iPhone that offers a nifty sort of search engine — one that matches modern mobile browsing habits. Google’s model of search breaks down in mobile, because Google relies on links to evaluate a Web page’s relevance and credibility. If you’re a typical smartphone user, you’ve probably been stymied when searching for application you want. Or search for “car racing game.” That’s where Chomp comes in. More generally, if you type in “car,” it won’t spit out a random list of apps that have the word “car” in their names.
Chomp launched its initial “recommendation engine” late last year, and has been generating reviews from users.