We mentioned this thought in passing alongside Dieter’s report on the Nokia App Ovi Store, which he says has far, far better discoverability than the iTunes App Store:
What Nokia has done is build a sophisticated relevancy engine that can sort apps based on a variety of factors that are actually relevant to you — like what you friends are using, or what kind of app you like to download, or what music you tend to prefer. It looks to be much better than your standard “top 50″ list
What if Apple merely took their own, existing discoverability process — Genius Recommendations, which debuted in iTunes 8 and iPhone OS 2.1 — and extended it to include Apps?
Sure, the automagical playlist generation part of Genius wouldn’t be necessary, but the part of Genius that scans your collection, anonymously uploads its metadata to the cloud, and then compares it with everyone else in the massive ecosystem in order to crowd source recommendations… that could help discoverability immensely. It could give us great apps that go great together, in Apple-speak.
Of course, Apple also has to crack down on short-sighted developers trying to game the search results, but Genius recommendations could go a long way towards cutting through the glut that 20,000+ apps brings with it. What think you?
This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.
Should Apple Add Genius Recommendations to the App Store?
We asked what else Google could possibly give iPhone users this month to add to the incredible list of Gmail Tasks, Latitude, Google Books, and Google (Active)Sync, and Google Docs spreadsheet editing, and pretty much everyone said: push Gmail.
Turns out we zigged and Google zagged, because they’ve whipped up offline Gmail instead.
What’s that and what does it mean? Offline WebApps use HTML5 standards and SQLite to keep your data open and available when you have no internet connection (like on most airplanes still). When your connection goes off, the data is kept live on the local machine, and when your connection comes back, it’s re-synced back to the cloud.
Okay, so IMAP already does this in MobileMail and other mail clients, fair enough. But Google’s IMAP is notoriously strange (and I’ll say it — shoddy), and many people prefer using the web interfaces anyway as it allows for a more consistent experience from device to device (a browser is a browser).
iPhoneBuzz thought offline Gmail looked ready for prime time, but says it’s still a proof-of-concept at this stage, and there’s no info yet one when Google might release it to the masses.
So, something you need? Something you want? Or should Google devote their Gmail time to push already?
This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.
Google Shows Offline GMail Proof-of-Concept for iPhone
It seems despite all the anticipation about Turn-by-Turn GPS routing for the iPhone, an App already exists in the App Store that delivers this basic functionality.
XRoad Co.'s G-Map U.S. West and G-Map U.S. East apps were released into...
