Comment by physcab | Hacker News Reader

Comment by physcab | Hacker News Reader

This has been brought up before [1].

I believe that currently, the biggest problem in mobile is discovery. I can't remember what problems were prevalent in 1999 but it could have been discovery on the web as well. If you're a startup, life is going to suck for you developing on mobile. You have a name recognition problem on top of developing on a platform where discovery is inherently broken. It will be tough to get those organic installs because on Apple, those are driven largely in part to your placement in the rankings, and there's less to do with SEO on the App Store as there is on Google. So I think success on mobile can be had in only a finite number of ways:

1) You buy your way to the top and hope your customer LTV > acquisition costs (See all mobile games)

2) You spam the hell out of your users on other distribution platforms (SocialCam)

3) You're lucky and you develop a truly great product that thrives on mobile (WhatsApp, Camera+)

4) You can succeed with mobile being a utility, but not the essence of your business (Uber).

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4172261

Agree with you totally, although I'd argue that mobile is most definitely the essence of Uber's business. If it weren't for the app I wouldn't use Uber; being able to see how far away my ride is and where it is right now is the only thing that keeps me from calling a cab.

Mobile is vital to Uber's business to function, but it isn't dependent on organic traffic through the App Store to succeed. They can exist with a relatively low number of installed users because their users have an absurdly high average revenue and retention rate compared to most mobile applications.

I'd contend that discovery is a problem faced only by app creators, not app consumers. This makes solving the "problem" difficult, since it's hard to convince the consumer to venture out into non-app store venues to look for hidden gems.

App discovery is a problem for consumers as well. My iPad does not show no more than ~40 games. I don't know if I am not looking hard enough or I just can't browse more than that what the app store app shows. I can search for an app, but I have to know the name of the app for that. So for me, if the app does not show in the app store app links, then the app pretty much does not exist.

If I do want a particular application, I search Google first than the app store. Most probably some one has already gone through the pains of finding an app and has talked about it online.

So discovery problem exists for app consumers as well. And there in lies a startup idea in app discovery but I wonder how Apple/Google would allow that.

Some anecdotal evidence: I went searching for an app that would stream the radio stations in iTunes. Several pages in, I ran into a ton of radio station streaming apps - they were the same app, each wrapping a different radio station.

After 10 pages of that, I gave up.

Searching the App Store or the Play is a painful experience whether you're just browsing around to find something interesting or if you're looking for something that does a specific thing. The categorization isn't fine-grained enough and the "curators" will pretty much let anything thru without showing any signs of quality or originality.

The desktop software market still suffers from this a little bit, but enough time has passed that some standards for quality have emerged from the general consciousness. You release a desktop app, there are some gold standards to compare to.

If anything, the app market is going to be incredibly painful for quite some time.

Agree with this. App discovery is rough for devs and users. From a dev perspective, it's hard to stick out. There's some fantastic apps out there that get lost in all the noise.

From a user perspective, the goal of discovery is to find the best apps that match my interests. This goal is hard to reach because of a poor user experience paired with inefficiencies in search and the download process.

It's this culmination of factors that makes app discovery a headache.

Try finding a good "when's the next bus?" for London on Android, and then tell me that discovery isn't an app consumer problem!

you may want to try http://tripease.info/en/

disclaimer: i know these guys

The problem is, I believe, TFL won't open up their API without charging for it.

Is your issue that they aren't available or that you can't tell which one is good?

There are far, far too many, and 95% of them are not very good. Even if you wanted to evaluate them all to try them out, this is actually quite hard - my searches start returning a mix of completely unrelated apps and relevant apps after a small number of results.

Don't know what your specific needs are, but I did a quick search and came up with London Transport Live (http://www.androidzoom.com/android_applications/transportati...), which from a quick play seems to do what I'd expect a transport app to do.

I know that the specific app isn't your point - it's more about the general question of discoverability, but I rarely find too much difficulty finding at least one reasonable example of the kind of app I'm searchig for.

Currently, the filter options for searching through Apple's App Store are pretty limited, so discovery is a bad experience for consumers as well. At least I get frustrated pretty quickly and often resort to Google.

Wasn't discovery one advantage that app store proponents brought up when touting the closed garden (in comparison to the open web)?

Sure but it didn't scale. As usually happens with the closed web.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com