[Android Apps and Games] Skyica:
Version 1.3

We’re working to make App Finder a highly reliable alternative to the Play Store’s built-in search. As an important step, we have now made significant improvements to the data updates.

Since Google does not offer an official API for app data, acquisition of the data is not trivial and quite expensive. Currently, we cannot update the data for all apps and all countries with high frequency, and must therefore make a selection.

If you are in a country with less frequent updates, it may thus be preferable to switch App Finder to a country with more frequent updates (Settings > Search-Country).

Following the new update frequencies. You will find this also in the Search-Country dialog. We will try to make further improvements soon.

The country-independent data (e.g. descriptions, images, # of downloads, global star ratings), as well as the local data (availability, prices, age ratings, star ratings) for the US, the UK, Canada, India and Germany is updated every day for all apps.

For the following countries, the local data for the ~600,000 apps that have at least 100 ratings, at least 200 recent downloads per month, or were released within the last month, are updated every week:

Algeria, Argentina, Australia, Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Egypt, France, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, Netherlands, Nigeria, New Zealand, Pakistan, Philippines, Poland, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine, Vietnam, as well as for the countries called “rest of the world” by Google Play (e.g. Ethiopia, Palestine).

For all countries, the local data for the ~120,000 apps that have at least 10,000 ratings, at least 10,000 recent downloads per month, or were released within the last month, are also updated every week.

We continue to update all data for all apps and all countries at least every 2 months.

The discovery of new apps has also been improved significantly. Google Play is now crawled more continuously, and more than 1000 new apps are now usually added each day. Most new apps are added 0-1.5 days after the release on Google Play.

To further improve App Finder’s reliability, we kindly ask all users to report possible errors in the data, and we offer a free lifetime Ultimate plan for every report of an error caused by a bug in App Finder.

We have made important improvements to ensure fast execution of all searches. About 99.7% of all queries now complete in under 1 second (on the server, depending on the connection it takes a bit longer for the results to arrive).

In addition to database optimization, we have made the following changes for this:

In cases where counting the results is estimated to take longer than a second, the first results are now returned without the count, and there is then an option to request the count. This probably will happen only for queries with only negative terms.

Some words are now translated to filter settings (like apps, games, free), and some very common words that are useless as queries are blocked.

The release date filter now has a “future segment”, so that one can filter for pre-register / early-access apps (or filter them out).

Also, the date since which we have recorded apps as pre-register / early-access is now shown. With the release date sort option, these apps are ordered by this date (early-access apps are sorted first).

Note that some apps that are pre-register / early-access in one country, are already released in some other country or countries, so that there is already a rating, rating count, and number of downloads available.

Available on Google Play,

APK here