iPhone App Discovery + “Mad Libs” for iPhone App Search


I’ve always been kind of a word geek. One of my favorite games when I was a kid was “Mad Libs“, a notebook of short stories with blank spaces provided for strategically placed nouns, adjectives and verbs. Depending on the words you or your friends chose, the resulting story could be hilarious, obscene, or just plain bizarre.

As many iPhone analysts have pointed out, finding iPhone apps within the iTunes App Store has become nearly impossible. If it doesn’t make the “New and Noteworthy” or Top 100 list, an iPhone app quickly gets lost in the huge and rapidly-growing sea of competing applications.

The team at AppStoreHQ was thinking about this problem the other day and came up with a fun idea: what if we created a “Mad Libs” for iPhone Apps? Because everyone’s looking for something different, but they all ask the same questions:

  • Is it a game or a utility, a travel app or a music app?
  • How much does it cost?
  • Has it been well-reviewed by other iPhone owners
  • Is it new, or has it been around for a while?

Our “App Search Ad Libs” feature (image above) is now live on AppStoreHQ. As you’d expect, the service lets you construct a simple sentence from the four questions above to create your own custom list of iPhone apps. (We also added a keyword field for those who want to narrow their results even further).

So now, if you want to see something like:

…we’ve got you covered.

If people like this enough, we’ll go ahead and add things like saved searches and RSS feeds, but (true to form) we wanted to get it out there and see what kind of feedback we received before spending more time on it.