How to Dig Through the Avalanche in App Marts

By BOB TEDESCHI
NYT

App stores are fine if you trust the store’s recommendations on big categories like music or games. But one of the best things about owning a smartphone is the apps for your personal hobbies.

Are you an amateur beer brewer? A quilter? A runner?

Great apps exist for all of these avocations, but good luck separating the bad from the good. The iTunes store returns 34 listings for “quilting,” 45 for “beer brewing” and hundreds for “running.” Beyond the first few apps in the initial results, the deeper list is presented in seemingly random order.

It’s even worse for Android users. The Android Market can’t be searched from a computer at all. Searching is confined instead to the phone’s screen, where one-star apps often appear atop four-star apps. Why? Who knows? A Google representative declined to comment.

Then there’s BlackBerry. Type “beer brewing” into the search box of BlackBerry’s App World, for instance, and it returns 17,500 listings. As for relevance, the top results include apps for three radio stations and an e-book about a Nazi resister.

(More here.)