The AppBrain Stream: Taking social app discovery to the next level.

Discovering interesting apps for your Android device is one of the most popular features of AppBrain. As the leading app discovery system for Android with more than 3 million users, we provide you with a collection of tools to discover great apps: Hot apps of the day, Personalized recommendations, App lists of other users, App search, Related apps, Top Apps by country and demographic, Apps with price drops, and many more.

However all these different options for finding apps can themselves become overwhelming and make finding apps more difficult than needed. We have been working on bringing most of our features together in one single place.

Today we are announcing the AppBrain Stream to make it easier for you to discover and share great apps.

The AppBrain Stream is a personalized feed of application-related news and events.

1. Install and Uninstall events from people you follow. This allows you to easily see which apps your friends are using.

        

2. Personalized app recommendations based on the apps you already like. These recommendations are refreshed daily.

        

3. App reviews. You can give an app a thumbs up or down with an optional comment and follow popular app reviewers to see what they reviewed.

        

4. Posted messages from people you follow. You can now post messages to your followers, e.g. to start a discussion on what is the best photo app for Android. Any links to apps in a post are automatically recognized such that the basic information about apps mentioned is easily accessible.

        

5. Announcements of new app updates from the apps you already have.

        

All entries in your stream can be liked, shared and commented on, just as you would like or comment on an activity on Facebook or Google+.

An app install can start a conversation 

You can login with Facebook and Twitter to automatically connect with your friends from these networks if they are also using AppBrain.

You can also find the most active app enthusiasts in the sidebar of your stream.

Once you follow someone you will see his activities in your stream.

We are very excited to bring social app discovery to the next level, and are curious about your feedback and suggestions. Please let us know.

Uwe - AppBrain Team

Overview of the AppBrain Stream

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App Timelines: even more dynamic app discovery!

We just launched a new version of the AppBrain website and app, which contains a new feature called “App Timeline”. The app timeline shows your recent app installs and uninstalls.

AppBrain allows you to share the list of apps you have installed on your phone with others. This is a great way to discover what apps other people have. However, keeping track of changes is not always easy, especially in somewhat longer lists. Also, remembering an app after uninstalling it is hard, as the app list only shows the currently installed apps.

The new app timelines make this much easier. The AppBrain app keeps track of exactly when you install or uninstall an app. This list is right next to your app list in the “Manage & Sync” section and is automatically synced to the AppBrain website. Naturally, you can choose to make this information private, or to share just your list or just your app timeline on a per-device basis.

Also new, everyone can personalize their AppBrain profile by adding a profile picture and some basic information like location and a description. To make it easy, you can take your photo from your facebook or twitter account, or just upload it from your phone. This makes it more clear who an app timeline belongs to.

We hope these new features will help you keep better track of your app installs and uninstalls and make browsing other users’ lists even more fun.


Check out the timeline of my current phone, the Samsung Galaxy S2: http://www.appbrain.com/user/mathijs/timeline/apps-on-the-gt-i9100


Happy app discovery,

Mathijs for the AppBrain team.

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AppBrain helps you find the most popular apps with in-app billing

Google launched in-app billing for Android apps in the Android market today. This is very exciting, as it so far has been very hard to get traction with paid apps in the market. On the AppBrain stats dashboard, it can be seen that a significant portion of free apps has more than 50,000 downloads, but only a tiny fraction of paid apps has reached the same levels, and 90% of all paid apps never receive more than 500 installs.

We have added a new page that provides the top Android apps with in-app billing enabled. Currently there are only 12 apps out of the nearly 160,000 in the market that have in-app billing enabled, but this will probably grow very quickly. The AppBrain stats page shows the overall top 10 and the top 10 apps that have been newly launched within the last week.

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New: Android market statistics overload on AppBrain!

Everybody knows the Android ecosystem has been growing tremendously over the last two years, and will be growing even more this year. The number of apps available on the Android market, the number of phones, and also the users of the AppBrain Android market are skyrocketing.

Although Android is an open ecosystem, this doesn’t mean useful statistics are easy to find. Google only occasionally discloses the number of apps available on the Android market. Even official data that is highly useful for developers, like the usage numbers of the different Android SDK versions, are only infrequently updated, and official data on for instance popularity of phone models is missing altogether.

Today we launch “AppBrain Android stats”. This is a view of the Android market, Android phones and AppBrain usage which we compile from the data we gather from the Android market, and from aggregated usage numbers of our own Android app and site. We hope this part of our site will help give developers, users and other people interested in the Android ecosystem useful data, and besides that it’s just plain fun to browse! These statistics will be updated on a daily basis.


Here are just a few interesting bits of information we gathered from the new pages:
- We know there are currently roughly 150,000 Android apps available  on the Android market, but roughly about 37% of those are low quality apps. (But Google seems to be removing some of those lately!)

- The most popular Android phone among AppBrain users is the Samsung Galaxy S. The most used SDK currently is 2.2 (Froyo), but 2.3 (Gingerbread) is starting to grow, and even Honeycomb is slowly showing up!
- The Android category with the most apps is Entertainment (21K), but it also has a high ratio of low quality apps (51%). The category with the highest proportion of paid apps is Personalization (75% paid apps), but their average price is the lowest of all categories: $ 1.25.
- The overall most searched terms has a number of evergreens like Angry Birds and facebook, but the hot searches show what people are searching for have been in the news lately (Read it later for instance).

Do you find some interesting bit of information in the pages? Or would you like us to add certain data? Let us know in the comments.

The AppBrain team.

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Fast web installer is back!

We are very happy to announce that the fast web installer is back. As you know, AppBrain tries to provide the best experience to find, install and share Android apps. We are grateful for all the excellent press we've gotten last week which confirmed that AppBrain is the place to go to for finding the best Android apps and sharing them with friends. Here are two examples:

"And here we have the crowning jewel of AppBrain: (...) app discovery." [DownloadSquad]
"Android Market website a step forward, still lags AppBrain." [ArsTechnica]

With fast web installer re-enabled, we're now again also providing the easiest way to install the apps you want. If you install the "Fast Web Installer" app on your phone, you allow AppBrain to push apps to your phone. In this way, you get the best of all worlds: the awesome AppBrain experience with the convenience of over-the-air installs:

The steps to take to get this on your phone are:

• Install the latest versions of both the AppBrain app and the Fast Web Installer app.
• Sign into the AppBrain app, enable the fast web installer in Menu > Preferences, and sign in with your gmail account.
• Go to http://www.appbrain.com/, find your favorite apps, and click "Install"

Did you know that you can also do over-the-air uninstalls from the AppBrain "my apps" page when you're on Android 2.2 or higher? On the my apps page you can also directly upload wallpapers to your phone, or send a link from the internet.

Fast Web Installer for Android on AppBrain

Notice that there are two caveats with the new fast web installer:

- You can not use this to get apps you otherwise would not be able to get. When you try to fast web install an app that is not available in your country or phone, nothing will happen.

- We do not get credentials to the "checkout" service, so it's impossible that we install paid apps for you.

Happy wireless app installing AND de-installing!

The AppBrain team.

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The top 10 most popular Android search terms, Android apps, and Android phones of 2010

Some people say 2011 will be the year Android is going to explode, but for AppBrain, 2010 was already a huge explosion! We launched the first version of AppBrain back in February. We got overwhelmed by all your positive feedback and the amazing growth in website traffic and number of downloads of the AppBrain app.

Since the launch in February the number of apps in the Android Market grew from 25,000 to 130,000 at the end of December 2010.
We are very proud you are using our service to discover the great apps within this huge collection, and you made us the leading website to discover Android apps. We will keep working hard on your feature requests and on making AppBrain even better in the coming year!

Now we would like to have a look back and share some interesting statistics we gathered over the year.

Most popular Android search terms in 2010

What are the most searched-for apps? The following table shows the top 10 search terms on AppBrain.com over the whole year:

1. skype
2. angry birds
3. live wallpaper
4. launcherpro
5. root
6. battery
7. swype
8. appbrain
9. widget
10. launcher

Half of these search terms are for very popular Android apps. It is very interesting to see that the generic search terms are for apps which are focused on customizing the Android phone, eg live wallpaper, widget and launcher.

Also the search for battery shows that there is huge interest in knowing more about the state of the battery and in tools to extend the battery life time.

Most popular Android apps in 2010

The top 10 apps viewed on AppBrain over the last year were:

Angry Birds for Android on AppBrain

AppBrain App Market for Android on AppBrain

Talking Tom Cat Free for Android on AppBrain

LauncherPro for Android on AppBrain

Barcode Scanner for Android on AppBrain

Skype for Android on AppBrain

ADW.Launcher for Android on AppBrain

Flash Player 10.1 for Android on AppBrain

Handcent SMS for Android on AppBrain

App 2 SD Free (move app to SD) for Android on AppBrain

The success of Angry Birds is amazing, especially considering that “Angry Birds Seasons” just didn’t make it into the top 10 as it was placed at 11.

Most popular Android phones in 2010


The 10 most popular Android devices among all the AppBrain users in 2010 were:

It is great to see that the most popular phones are quite powerful and run Android 2.1 or higher. This allows to develop more powerful apps for the users and less extra effort for the developers to support outdated platform versions.

Hopefully there will be Gingerbread,  dual core, and tablet devices in this list next year :)

We wish you a happy new year and hope that 2011 will be another great year for Android!

Mathijs & Uwe

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Family-friendly app browsing on AppBrain

Since last February, we have been optimizing the app discovery experience on Android with the AppBrain website and the AppBrain Android app. We think Google has done an excellent job in creating the Android operating system; it is both user-friendly and developer-friendly. However, as both user and developer we found that the Android market is lacking in many places, which is why we chose to create AppBrain.

A particularly big annoyance is the overflow of incoming 'spam' apps in the Android market. We tackled this problem on AppBrain a long time ago by hiding these bad apps from most users' eyes, which greatly improved the app browsing experience. However, we never fully remove these bad apps from our site to still allow users to see them if they really want to.

Even though the Android Market Content Policies do not allow apps with sexually explicit material, there are plenty of such apps available in the market. Ironically we also got notified by the Google AdSense team that it's not allowed to show ads next to information about these apps, which are present on their own Google Android market.
As with the spam apps we will not censor or remove these apps from our site, but instead we implemented an advanced 'mature content' filter on top of our already existing spam filter.
The new 'mature content' filter warns users when entering a page which shows an app with sexually explicit content. (Those apps which should not be in the Android Market according to the Android Market Content Policies):

We launched this feature on the AppBrain website today, and it will be also available in the AppBrain app in the next update!

We hope this will make it even easier for you to find the good apps you want without being bothered by spam and porn.

Happy holidays,

Mathijs for the AppBrain team.