New version out there

Some weeks ago we published the current version of appazaar. If you have not updated or installed it in the meanwhile you should do now :-) One of the new features is about app statistics. On the details page of apps you can now look into when and where apps are used mostly. One interesting example is Foursquare:

You can see the peaks around lunch and dinner time. So people seem to check-in when they are out for having a meal at places where they have a meal. Furthermore, you can now share apps on Facebook and Twitter — just connect your accounts. So if you find any interesting curves, we will be happy if you share them with us and your social networks.

Behind the scenery, we are experimenting with new recommender engines. For instance, knowledge of when apps are mostly used during course of the day will be used to improve recommendations. From your feedback we know that we can further improve on the recommender quality. If you have any comments or feature request, we will be happy to know about it.

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New version released

Yesterday we already upgraded our server with a new algorithm for running the recommender system, and today we are happy to release a new version of the app to the market. The most prominent feature is the screen with the recommendations. We listened to your feedback – many many thanks for that – and today we are happy to release to most demanded feature: appazaar now provides its recommendations within the app. So, if you don’t like it, you don’t need to use the widget anymore.

Please keep going on giving us feedback! We really like to meet your requirements for a perfect app recommender. For the next release, we are planning to re-design the UI and provide some smaller features to round up the recommender system.

You can use this QR-tag to download the new version of appazaar.

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Heavy use of appazaar

Wow, amazing! We currently have to cope with a big rush of new users. Some blogs mentioned appazaar and a lot of people twittered about it. We did not expect that great interest into appazaar — really cool! We are really impressed what effect viral marketing can have. However, this caused a lot of traffic and a big load on our server. We fixed small issues to get the service running again. Currently we are working on improving our server’s performance.

Thank you also for all the great feedback that you sent us by mail! We really want to keep up with all of your feature requests. Some of them will already be available in the next release. For instance we are working on the integration of everything into full app instead of forcing you to use the large widget. We are also thinking about providing different form factors for the widget. What do you think?

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New version (finally) available

Hey there, we got some good news for you ;)

While you’ve been looking for new apps using the lastest version of appazaar, we baked a new version with a lot of improvements and integrated a lot of your feedback as well as our own ideas into it! And now, after a long time of testing, it is finally available in the Market :D

This is what the new mobile app looks like:

This are our changes in detail:

  • “What are you just doing?”: Our recommendations are now tailored to your activity! Just answer the question and tell us something about your current activity to get the right apps.
  • Tags for your activity: So far you had to insert free text to describe your activity. Now you can use tags to describe your current context more quickly. And in addition you can now connect appazaar with Facebook! The tags you insert into the widget are directly posted to your status on Facebook :)
  • Blacklist: An app recommendation appears all the time and you don’t like it? Now you’re able to get rid of it by adding apps to a blacklist which can be edited within the settings.
  • Scrolling: You are now able to scroll through our recommendations from page to page directly within the widget. We think, this is a good tradeoff between widget size and the number of recommendations. What do you think?
  • Battery usage (GPS): Moritz did a really great job to improve the performance and battery usage. Nevertheless, for now we can not completely abandon the use of GPS positioning. Specially in areas with bad wireless/wifi coverage or insufficient accuracy appazaar falls back on gps positioning. There are already some more ideas in the pipeline to reduce this further and we’re confident to be able to minimize the usage of GPS further with the upcoming versions!

So just update appazaar or download it via the Market Store and let us know what you think about it ;)

(If you experience some issues after updating, please try a clean reinstall before submitting a bugreport!)

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appazaar 0.6b is out in the Market Store!

After a lot of work during the last week are proud to release the new version! We worked a lot on the power consumption and performance but we also changed the layout :) Take a look yourself and be prepared for the upcoming 0.7 for which we’re already giving a tiny preview in this release! We hope you like the new version! Please let us know if you have troubles with it or any ideas to improve it!

new widget layout

Changelog:
*new layout
*less battery usage
*less gps usage
*performance tweaks

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