AppESP works by indexing the Android Market, gathering data from professional and user reviews, ranking apps and automatically generating personalized app recommendations just for you.
iPhone groupies love to deride the Android Market's relative lack of applications. However, the fact of the matter is that a huge and ever-growing number of high-quality apps are available to Android device owners. Still, waiting for the best and most relevant apps to appear on your radar via mobile blogs or your social network isn't an efficient discovery method, and the Android Market, beyond a very basic categorization scheme, provides no alternative.
That's why we were excited to get an email today from Chris DeVore, a Seattle-based investor and entrepreneur. He's a co-founder at AppStoreHQ, a site that focuses on app discovery within increasingly crowded markets. We have highlighted the site in the past as an excellent way to find new Android apps, and we were thrilled that DeVore and company are using their skills to intelligently predict and surface apps that individual users will love using.
Along with AppStoreHQ's AppRank algorithm, AppESP also scrapes data from each user's device about what kinds of apps are already installed. Then, just as Netflix and Amazon.com do, AppESP determines relationships between the apps you have and the apps you might want, and delivers recommendations accordingly. Recommendations are discreetly sent to the Notifications bar, and they can be customized further with "Like/Dislike" user input.
It's a brilliant system that solves a pervasive problem in the Android Market -- in fact, if Google doesn't release a more intelligent app-finding solution with their upcoming web app store and apply the same solution to the Android Market, we can imagine AppESP as a possible acquisition opportunity for the makers of the Android OS.