[Android Apps and Games] Skyica:
This post was improved significantly on June 22

Finding the best apps for a specific purpose with the Play Store and with App Finder: A detailed example

Summary:

With App Finder, it is much easier and faster to find the best apps for a certain purpose.

A detailed example of a search for advanced calculator apps is given, but the principles apply for all kinds of apps, like file managers, music players, and also games.

In this article, I consider the case where commonly used terms are available for the search (scientific calculator and graphing calculator in the example). The next article is concerned with the opposite case.

If you find anything wrong or incomprehensible, please let me know!

Specifically, the example will be scientific calculator apps that can also draw graphs.

Since scientific calculator and graphing calculator are universally used terms, we would expect every such app to have these terms in the description. Not necessarily both exact phrases, but forms of the words scientific, graphing, and calculator (maybe something like scientific calculations, and graphs of functions).

Since Google Play tries to understand the meaning of search queries, it should (and does) easily find apps where such variations of the query appear in the description.

This is similar with App Finder since it equates different forms of words (e.g., graph, graphs, graphing, and calculator, calculations).

So,

scientific graphing calculator

seems to be a good query for both Google Play and App Finder.

Search engines like the Play Store search and App Finder cannot measure the actual quality of apps of course, but only consider data like user rating and number of users. Therefore, we can compare the performance only by how well they sort the results based on these data and the relevance to the query.

However, at least for the apps relevant to this example, their overall quality seems to coincide quite well with the average user rating, as you will see from my

comprehensive review of advanced Android calculator apps

:

The following 7 apps performed best in my tests and also have some of the best user ratings (compared to other relevant apps), all at least 4.60 stars:

Hiper Calc

Scientific calculator Plus 991

Scientific Calculator 300 Plus

Graphing calculator plus 84 83

Graphing Calculator + Math

Scientific Calculator by Philip Stephens

Graphing Calculator - Algeo

(I have looked through hundreds of apps and reviewed 40 of them. About 80 features were checked, and the apps were tested with several more difficult test problems.)

(There are several other good advanced calculator apps, but those are not described as scientific graphing calculators by the developers, and thus cannot be expected to be returned with the above query.)

It follows that the ranking of the listed apps will be a good measure for the performance of the search engines.

As the only relevant filter that can be applied in Google Play is for 4.0 or 4.5 stars user rating, let us first compare the results of the above query with a 4.5+ star user rating filter.

As you see from the screenshots below, the apps from the list are in position 1, 2, 4, 5, 16, 25, 33 with Google Play, and in position 1, 2, 3, 7, 9, 12, and 31 with App Finder.

Spoiler content hidden.

So far it seems that App Finder and Google Play perform quite similar.

But now consider the filters available in App Finder. If we require the apps to be updated within the last year, and increase the user rating requirement to 4.60 stars, we get only 21 results. They still include all 7 apps from the list.

We can narrow the search further by requiring the word calculator to occur in title or summary. For this, we just have to put a + in front of it in the search query. Now we have 18 results total, and the apps from the list are in positions 1, 2, 4, 8, 10, 12, 16. This is an improvement of about factor 2 against the search with Google Play.

(We could refine the search further by requiring also on of the words scientific or graphing in title or summary by adding +scientific/graphing to the query, which would remove 2 more irrelevant apps.)

Spoiler content hidden.

If we wanted to find the very best apps as fast as possible, we could increase the user rating requirement further to 4.70 stars. With this filtering, we get only 12 results. We have only lost Algeo which is much less comprehensive and powerful that the others, and Plus 84 83, which is a variant of Plus 991.

Spoiler content hidden.

Finally, consider that App Finder can show additional data, short descriptions, and screenshots directly in the result list. This makes it clearly much easier and faster to discern low quality from high quality apps, and ones that you may like from ones that you won't:

Play store:

App Finder:

Note that App Finder adapts to phones and tablets of all sizes. Here's how the result list may look on a 10" tablet:

Spoiler content hidden.