09/01/2013

iJoe App Store Recommends. Ep. 3

An App that appeared without much fanfare was appsfire but it shot up the Free App Store Charts recently after high praise from John Gruber and The NYT so I thought I'd check it out.

WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT?

appsfire is a App Store for the App Store. But it's so much more. The app is a place to find recommended apps, and great app deals. You can personalise it to suit your own personal App needs.

HOW IT WORKS.

appsfire is updated daily with any new deals on Apps, it lists these in either category view or price drop and free view. It also highlights an App of the day, Staff highlights, Apps on fire, trending apps and my personal favourite App Mixes. It shows each app to have a score based on reviews, user stats and download stats.

EACH KEY FEATURE - Broken Down.

App of the day - Every day you access the App you get a splash screen advertising the app of the day. This will be a nice high rated app with a sizeable price reduction.

Staff Highlights - What the good people back at the ranch think is the next best app or a great price promotion.

Apps on Fire - Any fast moving Apps, this allows you to stay ahead of the game and use the next big thing first.

Trending Apps - Utilising social media to see what apps are being talked about.

App Mixes - A great little feature that takes articles from News sites and blogs such as "The Best Music Apps of 2012" and posts them all in one place, so you can make your purchase the right one for you and not waste time searching though all the App Store.

It also has a What's new feature that allows you to see what has been added to the lists....during the time I've typed this review 64 apps have been added.

CUSTOMISATION

You can customise and personalise your layout and interaction with the app. When you first load the app it will ask you what sort of Person and likes you have, you can change your preferences to show/hide iPad only apps, free apps, games.
You can also change which streams you receive. So if you like books, but don't like games you can introduce a book stream and remove the games stream.
You can also be notified of each "App of The Day" or Deals via push notification. Also if there is an app you want, but don't want to pay that price you can set up an alert to tell you as soon as it comes down to your price range. You can utilise the search for finding ANY app on the App Store.
There is also the customary Facebook sharing and Email newsletter, this however can be switched off. I do however like the fact you can share apps via SMS or link.
If you share your iDevice with someone with Sensitive eyes you can also introduce a Maturity filter to only show apps that are suitable for their age range.
Finally you can create favourites and wish lists, so you can let others know great apps and get others to gift you some also.

USABILITY.

The design is very friendly and very easy to use. Also it's lightning fast on 3G service or wifi, it's actually faster than looking on Apples own App Store as the items load instantaneously and if you decide to buy one it takes you direct to the link in the App Store.

When you click on any app it's lightening fast and it loads so much detail, in each screen you can see everything you would need to know, you have small cards that replicate the detail of the Apple App Store you can click on these cards to swipe thought them to see all the description, screenshots, app development history, social media chatter, along with little nuggets of detail like the maturity rating and size (Colour coded for good measure.)

iJOE VIEW.

This is an absolute winner. A lot of developers have tried and failed at this type of thing but this is a great app to enhance your iDevices capabilities and also look after the pounds and pence.

A lot of people, myself included, where left disappointed by iTunes 12 Days of Christmas app for the quality of downloads, this app has the ability to give you 365 days of Apps on offer, or hot right now. The personalisation and price alerts really put this App on the top shelf. I've used the app for around 48 hours and have already topped 30+ downloads. It allows you to discover apps you might need in the future for free or cheap, for instance, I downloaded loads of City guides apps for popular world cities for free, I have no trips planned but it's better to download them all free now than wait till I'm there, and pay full price and excessive data charges.

GET IT - YOU WON'T REGRET IT.

iJoe

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