The Android Platform is growing fast. Not only more and more devices are equipped with the most innovative operating system, also the number of applications available in the Android market is rapidly increasing. Thus, it becomes a problem for users to keep track with the huge amount of apps and to find cool new and useful apps on the market. Apple has build its great recommender system Genius into the App Store to solve this issue and support the users. However, such a feature is currently missing for the Android platform. This is where appazaar kicks in!
appazaar is a recommender system for Android apps. It learns which applications are interesting for a user and recommends applications according the user’s personal taste. Therefore it tracks the application usage and compares it to other peoples interests in applications. Thereby appazaar is able to give personalized recommendations of apps.
Furthermore, appazaar is not only tailored to the user’s app taste, it is also location-aware. Android users are mobile people and often change their location. With their location they also change their activity, for instance from working at the office to chilling at the beach. appazaar uses that to optimize its recommendations! Surely you agree that you require apps for productivity at work and games and music apps for relaxing at the beach. 0:1 for Android and appazaar! Apple’s Genius fails in making this small but important distinction.
The more people are using appazaar and the more appazaar knows about their application usage, the better the recommendations will be. appazaar is currently in the fledgling stages but growing fast. So give it a try and use it for a while.
appazaar is available on the Android market and can be used without any registration or login right away. Just get it and receive personalized and location-aware recommendations for all those cool apps out there!
appazaar is a project of the Software Engineering Lab at Münster University of Applied Sciences, Germany. The research group is working on location- and context-aware mobile systems.
I like the idea but I have a couple of problems with the app.
1. Why is it just a widget and not a full app? The widget requires a 3×3 block on my home screen. My home screen is valuable real estate! I might not want to devote that much space to Appazaar.
2. Can Appazaar give me some reason why it’s recommending each app? For example, “We recommend Shazam because others who use Pandora and Amazon and live in California use Shazam”. That would be very interesting to see.
Hi Dan, thank you for your feedback! We totally agree with you!
1) We are already working on the next version of appazaar. It will provide an activity for the recommendations and some other features within a full app.
2) Sure! This this is a very nice idea! It is already in our list of research topics. I think we can increase its priority. We will release it as soon as possible, but before we really want to improve and test this feature. You will find a message on this blog when it is ready for shipping.
Best,
Matthias
[...] Android needs a genius?! Here comes appazaar The Android Platform is growing fast. Not only more and more devices are equipped with the most innovative operating system, also the number of applications available in the Android market is rapidly increasing. Thus, it becomes a problem for users to keep track with the huge amount of apps and to find cool new and useful apps on the market. Apple has build its great recommender system Genius into the App Store to solve this issue and support the users. However, such a feature is currently missing for the Android platform. This is where appazaar kicks in! (read more) [...]